“I will RUIN you…” and other holiday nonsense

If you think you can run my business better than me, please make sure to tell me. I LOVE hearing that. Especially during the stressful holiday season.

Thanksgiving week is the biggest week of the year for retail/wholesale bakeries.

Now, December is a big MONTH- Christmas parties, office parties, celebrating on a few different days due to large family commitments, etc. May is also a huge month with Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, graduations, etc. Then you have a few holidays and wedding seasons scattered throughout the year to help boost sales…..but Thanksgiving week, well, you plan for that for months. Because it’s basically just two days of sales for your entire month of November. It’s an EATING holiday on the exact same day for almost everyone in America.

If your bakery makes only desserts, you have a slightly easier week. If your bakery makes bread and desserts, you have a crazy week. If your bakery makes bread, desserts, AND sides…. it’s pure mayhem (even if you planned for it).

When I had the retail shop, we were closed Thanksgiving weekend, just to recover ( I used to lay on my parents’ couch all Thanksgiving Day too). So, Tuesday and Wednesday were always huge days - lots of overtime worked by myself and my employees, and lines out the door for all the people who forgot to order. Now, as the oldest daughter of a large family, I don’t understand this last-minute behavior, (it’s May and I have Christmas presents planned in my head). I also don’t understand the people who can’t make a decision, because I’ve never had that problem, as I always know what I want. But this is the typical excuse we would get at the bakery for why pre-orders weren’t placed for the largest food holiday of the year. And so, the lines, the absolute panic, and sheer volume of baking would make our retail lives chaos for the next week.

Let me give you an example, in 2019, I had twelve employees, not including myself. We fulfilled $6,000 worth of preorders and sold $5,000 worth of case items to make it the largest 2-day total ever at the bakery. It’s a FEAT to pull that off when you think that the average ticket price per customer is around $25 (some people spend $100, and some people wait in line for a $4 cupcake to take to Thanksgiving dinner). And don’t get me started on the profit/loss there——it took so many employees to pull that off that we actually only broke even that Thanksgiving. No profit, all headache.

So, $11,000 worth of baked goods starts right after Halloween. You make 200lbs of pie dough and start rolling crusts out for the freezer in early November. (And trust me, October was already busy, so you’re tired now with three weeks to go). Everyone is making gallons of pie filling, from scratch. Peeling and slicing apples, making pumpkin pie filling in tubs, and don’t forget- it’s still regular birthdays, class parties, wholesale baking, catering customers, and general customers showing up during this time too.

The bottom line is, when you finally get to that Tuesday of Thanksgiving week as a bakery owner, you haven’t slept more than four hours a night for WEEKS. Some of your employees are on their 10th hour of OT (because they love that OT pay) and some of them have refused to work OT for their work/life balance (even though you begged them). You couldn’t fathom how much you really needed in ingredients and have taken two last minute across town trips to Restaurant Depot. You ate frosting for breakfast and had 40 gallons of coffee to just be upright. Every customer that hasn’t placed a pre-order has come in today in sheer panic and placed all the blame for their lack of planning on you, because there is no pumpkin pie left in the case and how could you do this to them?

This is why retail workers hate holiday sales- it really brings out the worst humans. I tell you my 2019 sales because I’m proud of the growth. It’s cool that I could employ 12 people in a tiny bakery (night shift baker and everything), and I had almost 30 wholesale accounts, and thousands of dollars in sales a week from hundreds of customers. That’s super cool and it’s always something to be proud of as a small business owner.

But this story is not about that Thanksgiving, this story is about year 3 Thanksgiving, which was a year of a growing pains for the bakery. The customer growth started shooting up in year three after the only other peanut free bakery closed ( I was still the only gluten free bakery). I hired three other employees in addition to myself and my other baker (5 people making Thanksgiving stuff for a SUDDEN influx of customers- yikes!). I only had the one convection oven at the time and one regular oven, and we were still making lunch in-house and sides for Thanksgiving. Food (aka a small restaurant) is a totally different entity than a bakery, so I was essentially running two different businesses.

I had worked every day for two months, and we were almost to the finish line. It was right before closing on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when a man walked in and asked for 2 pumpkin pies. Now, the bakery was closing in a few minutes, but the workers weren’t leaving, we had a million preorders to still fulfill (so it felt like to us). My bakery clerk called me up to the front, as the man was told there were no pumpkin pies, and he wanted to speak to me. So I explained that we hope to have extra tomorrow after we fulfill the orders and he said “Great, save me two of those.” So I explained again that these pies weren’t made and I don’t sell items to people when those items don’t actually exist yet. What if the power went out and never came back on? What if my employees all overslept at the same time and never showed up? What if I got to the bakery and it was robbed and we couldn’t finish baking all the pies (that happened once). What if I ran out of pumpkin pie filling immediately after filling all the preorders and had no extra left? This is why I don’t sell items that are theoretically (aka on the baking prep list if there is time) being made the next day. So the man walked out the door while making a phone call. He got in his car in the parking lot, but talked on the phone and didn’t leave.

About 5 minutes later, the bakery phone rings and my clerk answers it. She starts apologizing and then starts crying and cannot continue the phone conversation anymore. I immediately take the phone from her and explain that I’m the owner and how can I help? This is how that conversation went:

Me: Hi, I’m the owner how can I help you?

Customer: My husband was just in there and you refused to sell him 2 pumpkin pies, and he said you were making them.

Me: (I explain exactly what I told him to his wife)

C: I don’t understand, if you’re making the pies, then we need two of them. We’re good customers, I get all my birthday cakes there for my daughters with peanut allergies.

Me: I am definitely going to do my best to make extra pies, but they aren’t made yet, so I can’t sell you an extra pie right now. But if you can send your husband back in the morning, we can give him the first two extra pies we have.

C: I can’t send him in the morning, I can send him now.

Me: Well, I don’t have any now.

C: Didn’t I JUST tell you that were good customers? We always buy birthday cakes each year for our two daughters. And NOW we have to be told NO by some GIRL (my clerk) who doesn’t even know who we ARE?

Me: (silent- I mean what else can I even explain here? I also didn’t know who they were)

C: (continues) This is totally unacceptable behavior and NO WAY to run a business. I cannot believe you would ever tell your customers NO. How dare you say we can’t get a pie when we have bought all of our birthdays cakes from you? This is a horrible way to run a business, you’ll never make it. If you don’t get me a pie tomorrow, I will RUIN you.

Me: (Is this real life?) Ma’am, I have worked 56 days in a row making orders for customers who already pre-paid for their pies. I have barely slept or eaten in two months. I stand for 16 hours a day and roll out dough to make pies for all the customers who have PRE-ORDERED their items. And then I have to take long phone calls from customers who make my employees CRY and explain to them several different ways how it may be physically impossible to make two extra pies for a customer who did not preorder in time. So, HOW WOULD YOU RUN THIS BUSINESS? (totally yelling by the end because I am deliriously exhausted)

C: I just want you to know that I will NEVER buy from you again and I will put you right out of business because I know a lot of people who are your customers and they will NEVER go there again.

And you know what? Ten years later, I closed that retail shop…. when the lease was up. She was such an integral part in that, my self-proclaimed-but-never-seen nemesis who never came back.

I’ve never forgotten this conversation because I cannot fathom any reason in life to tell anyone “I will RUIN you” - it’s so nuts. But now it’s been 11 years since that conversation, so I like to think that woman was just having the worst day of her life. Or maybe her husband was supposed to order those pies weeks before and he failed at that small task again and now she has to feed 40 people at Thanksgiving with no pies. But he never came back the next day, and we DID make extra pies. I stayed late myself just to pull it off, and then slept on my parents’ couch all day at Thanksgiving.