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"the salaries of pastry makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the American ec

"the salaries of pastry makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the American economy isn’t necessarily behaving the way workers have traditionally assumed. ... Employers, according to those in the industry, have increasingly turned to less experienced workers to ensure the flow of sweets" The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software development as well.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
"Drive" is right. It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many employers have come to believe that cheap labor is a moral principle. If employers would rather hire lower-skilled workers than pay over $35k/year, the pastry chefs should unionize.
- wskinner 10y ago
  Or perhaps Americans are OK with the pastries produced by lower-skilled workers. Maybe they can't taste a difference.
  - erikb 10y ago
    There are actually customers for both, quality for a price, and cheap mass production.
  - davidw 10y ago
    There's definitely something to this: I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot, and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot. In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful. It is changing though: it's possible to get real Italian Parmigiano cheese at the Costco here in Bend, Oregon. Growing up, all I knew of "parmesan cheese" was that green crap that comes in a can, where they were apparently using wood pulp to bulk it up. EDIT: BTW, this book by Tyler Cowen has some interesting stuff about "why food in the US was so bad": http://amzn.to/2dNxksx http://amzn.to/2dNxksx
    - alexc05 10y ago
      It seems he's retitled the book to "An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen (2013) Paperback Paperback" I do like yours better, but suspect that'd be less popular stateside
      - davidw 10y ago
        That wasn't the title, I just quoted it as a subject that the book covers. Sorry for the confusion.
    - flukus 10y ago
      I find higher quality food to be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. When I'm cooking for myself, occasionally I'll take the time to make everything from scratch with fresh ingredients and it will be nicer, but it's only 10-20% nicer (if that can be quantified) for several times more effort.
      - koliber 10y ago
        I think each person values the increase in food quality differently. You could rate the difference between a store-bought packaged croissant and a freshly baked French croissant at 10-20%. I may say that the French one is 95% better, as the a store bought one is inedible for me. Neither one of us is inherently right or wrong. It's a matter of personal opinion, and even though we try to, it is not really possible to quantify the difference as a percentage in any meaningful way. I think the discussion here is trying to highlight that many people in the US value better food less than many people in some countries on the old continent. For a given choice, an American will not think that the difference is worth the price (or effort) while a Frenchman or an Italian (I'm trying to use example s from this thread) will not even consider eating the lesser version. I speak from personal experience. I've spent most of my life in the US and six years ago moved to Europe. My tastes have changed, and whereas before I like American food, now my tastes have shifted and a lot of American food does not taste good to me. Now, when I go to the US, a lot of food is at best flavorless and at worst disgusting. Most glaring examples are breads, cold cuts (a.k.a sandwich meats) and tomatoes. BTW, this is not universal across all foods. I still find American hamburgers (not fast food) to be better than their European alternatives.
  - munificent 10y ago
    Maybe they can't afford a difference. :(
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Or take steps to demonstrate the difference in quality and value. Do pastry chefs who make more money make demonstrably better pastries? Does every employer need that demonstrably better quality? Will enough people buy the pastry for the resulting price?
- Swizec 10y ago
  "It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many customers have come to believe that cheap pastries are a moral principle." I think that's the gist of the issue. People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience.
  - bootload 10y ago
    "People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience." My local pâtisserie doesn't charge 5$AUD for a whole range of pastry ~ https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/albums/72157622498559456 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/albums/72157622498559456 The high prices you quote come not from materials, display or worker pay, more probably property location and market they position themselves in.
    - chewxy 10y ago
      The prices seem a bit low for 2016. A pastry shop I frequent (not really frequently given my family went low-carbish a few years ago) had their eclairs go from $4.50 to $8 in over the past 5-6 years. :S. Granted they also became a lot more famous.
      - bootload 10y ago
        "The prices seem a bit low for 2016." there are dates on the various shots. Haven't noticed price increases since then. The shop is owned by French owners who grow the fruit/veg (sans exotic). Famous in my town.
    - Swizec 10y ago
      The point is that there's an upper bound for how much you can charge for a pastry. This induces an upper bound on how much you can spend to make it. It doesn't matter how skill or how rare the worker is, if you can't sell their work for a higher price.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
hughes 10y ago
Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs. With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for a more expensive software developer to produce lower-cost software if the cost savings come from better planning, more fluency with the toolset, and fewer (high-impact) bugs.
- riskable 10y ago
  Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand. Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)! Rant: Looking towards the future I want to know which ignorant fools are in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory product that is currently shipping with the same damned ignorant mistake (no salt). I mean, seriously guys: How can you allow the product to continue with such a blatant disregard for basic security?! Microsoft is going to be the next LinkedIn if they don't fix it.
  - uremog 10y ago
    Bad chefs create negative value just as easily. Wasted ingredients. Bad product that looks ok and leads to unhappy customers. Etc.
    - yomly 10y ago
      Poor hygiene leading to food poisoning too
      - jobu 10y ago
        This comment made me think of Chipotle. I haven't eaten there since all the food poisoning problems. Chipotle is a big chain and got national attention for the poisonings, but in the age of Yelp a few people getting sick can tank a small local business. Better to pay a little more for decent employees that care about their job and also give them benefits so they don't come in sick and spread disease.
mc32 10y ago
Problem is price for pastries is more or less elastic. I'll pay $2 to $4 for a croissant/crescent but I'm not going to pay more than that. An $8 croissant isn't going to be any better because the preparer gets paid more. It may taste marginally better with more expensive ingredients, but not because the chef/baker/baxter is paid more.
- cheriot 10y ago
  I think you're giving away another reason. In general, Americans don't value high quality food. A croissant is a croissant to us. Tyler Cowan wrote an interesting book speculating why. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/
  - blawson 10y ago
    I think by that logic no one values high quality food? A croissant in Paris is probably about 2 euros as well. If we both agree the French tend to do croissants better, and care about it more, so how come theirs don't cost significantly more?
    - cheriot 10y ago
      Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly. There's a lot of economic levers to push.
      - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        >Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly. True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries. Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/ http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cooki... (Mind, I might be an edge-case, since I've practiced baking since I was five years old.)
logicallee 10y ago
No it really doesn't. It probably take all of 90 minutes to learn everything there is to know about making the pastries which are on the menu. Pastry-making is glorified robotics (but it's very exacting, baking is rather unforgiving compared to other forms of cooking.) Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.
- Retric 10y ago
  Have you ever worked in a bakery? Doing it well is actually a complex balancing act based on materials and the environment. PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  - Alupis 10y ago
    I don't know if Dunning Kruger actually applies well here. Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 10y ago
      I assume they fail to grasp their ineptitude. Frequently doing a good job is not enough. In a professional setting failure has real costs and you are directly paid to minimize those failures.
    - taneq 10y ago
      One aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that your own lack of ability at a task precludes your ability to judge the difficulty of that task (because you don't know your unknown unknowns.) This often surfaces in the software world as non-programmer managers asking "how hard could it be?" and assuming software developers are unskilled, interchangeable, replaceable cogs.
    - 10y ago
eloisant 10y ago
The big difference is that a software developer can have an impact on software used by millions (sometimes even billions) of users. So it can be cost-effective to have an expensive software developer. A pastry chef however can only produce so many pastries every day, so for them to get better pay they need to sell the pastry for more. Is the high-quality high-price pastry market big enough for that?
- verbify 10y ago
  Many software developers write in-house applications for SMEs. These will be used by sometimes dozens or hundreds of people - not millions or billions. Companies that write software applications that have millions or billions of users generally hire expensive developers.
debacle 10y ago
Take heart, as the industry matures I'm seeing much more wariness about fresh employees and a refreshing willingness to spend money on talent.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

"Drive" is right. It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many employers have come to believe that cheap labor is a moral principle. If employers would rather hire lower-skilled workers than pay over $35k/year, the pastry chefs should unionize.

wskinner 10y ago
Or perhaps Americans are OK with the pastries produced by lower-skilled workers. Maybe they can't taste a difference.
- erikb 10y ago
  There are actually customers for both, quality for a price, and cheap mass production.
- davidw 10y ago
  There's definitely something to this: I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot, and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot. In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful. It is changing though: it's possible to get real Italian Parmigiano cheese at the Costco here in Bend, Oregon. Growing up, all I knew of "parmesan cheese" was that green crap that comes in a can, where they were apparently using wood pulp to bulk it up. EDIT: BTW, this book by Tyler Cowen has some interesting stuff about "why food in the US was so bad": http://amzn.to/2dNxksx http://amzn.to/2dNxksx
  - alexc05 10y ago
    It seems he's retitled the book to "An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen (2013) Paperback Paperback" I do like yours better, but suspect that'd be less popular stateside
    - davidw 10y ago
      That wasn't the title, I just quoted it as a subject that the book covers. Sorry for the confusion.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I find higher quality food to be a case of rapidly diminishing returns. When I'm cooking for myself, occasionally I'll take the time to make everything from scratch with fresh ingredients and it will be nicer, but it's only 10-20% nicer (if that can be quantified) for several times more effort.
    - koliber 10y ago
      I think each person values the increase in food quality differently. You could rate the difference between a store-bought packaged croissant and a freshly baked French croissant at 10-20%. I may say that the French one is 95% better, as the a store bought one is inedible for me. Neither one of us is inherently right or wrong. It's a matter of personal opinion, and even though we try to, it is not really possible to quantify the difference as a percentage in any meaningful way. I think the discussion here is trying to highlight that many people in the US value better food less than many people in some countries on the old continent. For a given choice, an American will not think that the difference is worth the price (or effort) while a Frenchman or an Italian (I'm trying to use example s from this thread) will not even consider eating the lesser version. I speak from personal experience. I've spent most of my life in the US and six years ago moved to Europe. My tastes have changed, and whereas before I like American food, now my tastes have shifted and a lot of American food does not taste good to me. Now, when I go to the US, a lot of food is at best flavorless and at worst disgusting. Most glaring examples are breads, cold cuts (a.k.a sandwich meats) and tomatoes. BTW, this is not universal across all foods. I still find American hamburgers (not fast food) to be better than their European alternatives.
- munificent 10y ago
  Maybe they can't afford a difference. :(
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Or take steps to demonstrate the difference in quality and value. Do pastry chefs who make more money make demonstrably better pastries? Does every employer need that demonstrably better quality? Will enough people buy the pastry for the resulting price?
Swizec 10y ago
"It often seems like even at the cost of getting inferior work-product, many customers have come to believe that cheap pastries are a moral principle." I think that's the gist of the issue. People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience.
- bootload 10y ago
  "People want a $5 snack, not a $35 artisanal free-range organic pastry dining experience." My local pâtisserie doesn't charge 5$AUD for a whole range of pastry ~ https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/albums/72157622498559456 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/albums/72157622498559456 The high prices you quote come not from materials, display or worker pay, more probably property location and market they position themselves in.
  - chewxy 10y ago
    The prices seem a bit low for 2016. A pastry shop I frequent (not really frequently given my family went low-carbish a few years ago) had their eclairs go from $4.50 to $8 in over the past 5-6 years. :S. Granted they also became a lot more famous.
    - bootload 10y ago
      "The prices seem a bit low for 2016." there are dates on the various shots. Haven't noticed price increases since then. The shop is owned by French owners who grow the fruit/veg (sans exotic). Famous in my town.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    The point is that there's an upper bound for how much you can charge for a pastry. This induces an upper bound on how much you can spend to make it. It doesn't matter how skill or how rare the worker is, if you can't sell their work for a higher price.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

hughes 10y ago

Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs. With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for a more expensive software developer to produce lower-cost software if the cost savings come from better planning, more fluency with the toolset, and fewer (high-impact) bugs.

riskable 10y ago
Not only that but a cheap, inexperienced dev can create negative value. Not just in the product that they're working on but your entire brand. Just ask LinkedIn or Yahoo if it was a good idea to put some ignorant fool in charge of the system that stored passwords. Aside: I'm sure that person is worth more now because they won't make such mistakes (again)! Rant: Looking towards the future I want to know which ignorant fools are in charge of Microsoft's Active Directory product that is currently shipping with the same damned ignorant mistake (no salt). I mean, seriously guys: How can you allow the product to continue with such a blatant disregard for basic security?! Microsoft is going to be the next LinkedIn if they don't fix it.
- uremog 10y ago
  Bad chefs create negative value just as easily. Wasted ingredients. Bad product that looks ok and leads to unhappy customers. Etc.
  - yomly 10y ago
    Poor hygiene leading to food poisoning too
    - jobu 10y ago
      This comment made me think of Chipotle. I haven't eaten there since all the food poisoning problems. Chipotle is a big chain and got national attention for the poisonings, but in the age of Yelp a few people getting sick can tank a small local business. Better to pay a little more for decent employees that care about their job and also give them benefits so they don't come in sick and spread disease.

mc32 10y ago

Problem is price for pastries is more or less elastic. I'll pay $2 to $4 for a croissant/crescent but I'm not going to pay more than that. An $8 croissant isn't going to be any better because the preparer gets paid more. It may taste marginally better with more expensive ingredients, but not because the chef/baker/baxter is paid more.

cheriot 10y ago
I think you're giving away another reason. In general, Americans don't value high quality food. A croissant is a croissant to us. Tyler Cowan wrote an interesting book speculating why. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GSYYQ2/
- blawson 10y ago
  I think by that logic no one values high quality food? A croissant in Paris is probably about 2 euros as well. If we both agree the French tend to do croissants better, and care about it more, so how come theirs don't cost significantly more?
  - cheriot 10y ago
    Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly. There's a lot of economic levers to push.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >Perhaps there's more people in Paris that know how to make awesome croissants. Maybe it's considered "fancy" food in the US and marked up accordingly. True, but I can still make far superior chocolate-chip cookies (an American staple pastry) at home, for cheap, than I've ever had from 90% of stores and bakeries. Try out the following recipe with the addition of half a lemon's juice, switching out all the sugar for brown sugar. You can either use the full load of chocolate chips, or substitute dark chocolate, or do like I do and half the chocolates so you can enjoy the cookie. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/ http://allrecipes.com/recipe/10813/best-chocolate-chip-cooki... (Mind, I might be an edge-case, since I've practiced baking since I was five years old.)

logicallee 10y ago

No it really doesn't. It probably take all of 90 minutes to learn everything there is to know about making the pastries which are on the menu. Pastry-making is glorified robotics (but it's very exacting, baking is rather unforgiving compared to other forms of cooking.) Software development consists of creating a new recipe every day: you are NOT following well-defined steps.

Retric 10y ago
Have you ever worked in a bakery? Doing it well is actually a complex balancing act based on materials and the environment. PS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- Alupis 10y ago
  I don't know if Dunning Kruger actually applies well here. Parent is not assuming they are an expert/professional at baking, rather, Parent is assuming baking isn't difficult.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 10y ago
    I assume they fail to grasp their ineptitude. Frequently doing a good job is not enough. In a professional setting failure has real costs and you are directly paid to minimize those failures.
  - taneq 10y ago
    One aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that your own lack of ability at a task precludes your ability to judge the difficulty of that task (because you don't know your unknown unknowns.) This often surfaces in the software world as non-programmer managers asking "how hard could it be?" and assuming software developers are unskilled, interchangeable, replaceable cogs.
  - 10y ago

eloisant 10y ago

The big difference is that a software developer can have an impact on software used by millions (sometimes even billions) of users. So it can be cost-effective to have an expensive software developer. A pastry chef however can only produce so many pastries every day, so for them to get better pay they need to sell the pastry for more. Is the high-quality high-price pastry market big enough for that?

verbify 10y ago
Many software developers write in-house applications for SMEs. These will be used by sometimes dozens or hundreds of people - not millions or billions. Companies that write software applications that have millions or billions of users generally hire expensive developers.

debacle 10y ago

Take heart, as the industry matures I'm seeing much more wariness about fresh employees and a refreshing willingness to spend money on talent.