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Just hate to see this part: OnLive was a frequent customer or Prolific Oven Bakery in Palo Alto, said Regina Chan, daughter of the owner of the local chain. By
by phil 14y ago
Just hate to see this part:
OnLive was a frequent customer or Prolific Oven Bakery in Palo Alto, said Regina Chan, daughter of the owner of the local chain. By the time the company went through its insolvency in August, it owed the bakery $2,000, which represented about a month's worth of Onlive's orders, she said.
- dhbanes 14y agoIs this not an understood risk of selling muffins on credit?
- crystalis 14y agoCompanies need to understand that they should seek revenue before customers and vanity metrics.
- madaxe 14y agoCupcakes are business critical though. Oh wait, no, the other thing.
- kamaal 14y agoAlthough they might have lost $2K on cupcakes, but the amount of money they would have made by attracting customers on credit is huge. So generally offering things on credit is like bait to catch customers, there is risk I agree. But profits from such schemes vastly exceed losses, to make them almost negligible. Lets say you own a bakery, you sell cupcakes on credit. Say you sell $40K worth cupcakes an year to a company. There are chances that you may go under a loss of $2K if the company folds. Will you go for it, or do not offer any credit and lose $40K worth cupcake businesses to somebody else?
- ojbyrne 14y agoDoesn't this depend on your profit margin, which I suspect is larger for cupcakes than muffins... If you sell $40k of cupcakes that cost $39.5k to make, credit risk is much more of an issue than if they cost $20k to make.
- kamaal 14y agoAgreed, but generally there is an opportunity cost associated with any risk. You just have to decide if you are ready to lose the opportunity if you don't want to take the risk. I know it sounds unfair, but unfortunately that is how things work in the real world. If there was no risk associated with opportunities, then the number of people who be would competing for an opportunity will go up by a large number. Nature puts filters to keep the size of the game limited.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI would have disliked it more if it was the original owners, once Ms. Chan bought it the quality of the cakes suffered, especially in the Saratoga store. It went from being my 'go to' place for a delicious chocolate on chocolate cake to 'I've not been there for like 3 years now.'
- msie 14y agoTranslation: they don't deserve as much empathy from me because they make crappy cakes.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoWhich is a corollary of people making awesome things deserving more empathy than usual. ;).
- phil 14y agoCome on - your local bakery (even if it's a chain, even if you don't like it as much as you used to) is a low-margin enterprise. Getting screwed out of thousands of dollars is tough on places like that. Plus that was just the example. If they were net-30 on the break room food, it's a safe bet a bunch of freelancers and other local businesses also had losses.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThis particular bakery was pretty legendary for a long time in the bay area.
- kabdib 14y agoWe got our wedding cake from the Prolific Oven ten years ago. It was /amazing/. Sad to hear they've taken a dive.
- danielha 14y ago$2k in monthly cupcakes... I gotta step up my cupcake game.
- photorized 14y agoHopefully the PR the bakery gets from this makes up for those losses.