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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

A good generality, but I'll disagree on the bakery/sandwich specifics.

There's a lot of overhead in a sandwich shop hiring a baker, then outfitting a kitchen to efficiently bake bread at scale. And how do you handle his days off, with n=1 baker?

Vs. a bakery only needs 4' of counter space to do a modest volume of basic (cold cuts & such) sandwiches. Unless it's a pretty upscale bakery, the customers will be fine with less-than-fancy sandwiches at less-than-fancy prices - those are mainly a "while I'm here" convenience. Vs. a "great sandwich" shop has to qualify as a destination.

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I agree here. I more often see bakeries selling sandwiches that they make in house (although no clue as to the volume/financials of it), but rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking. The independent ones out-source to a bakery and if it's a well known bakery, they will advertise where they get their bread.

> rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking

Subway?

Don't they just heat up frozen/pre-made bread? I don't know...just I don't think they have enough room to be a real bakery. Also, corporate financials would have centralized that a long time ago.

No, subway and panera do the same thing. Fresh premade dough is delivered every night, refrigerated. At Panera, a baker runs it through the oven overnight and finishes baking just before open. Subway throws dough in the oven as needed throughout the day, they have much higher volume.

Frozen dough doesn't come out the same, nor does reheated pre-baked bread. It's fresh it just isn't made from scratch there in the store.

There's a couple dozen fresh dough facilities scattered throughout the US that serve all of these restaurants that need fresh bread, but without the cost of paying someone to mix flour locally.

Yeah that is basically what I meant, but I should've said refrigerated and not frozen. It is still a far cry from what I would call a bakery.

It's not a bakery, it's a sandwich shop that bakes bread.

Domino's does (or did) the same when I worked there. Refrigerated dough delivered from regional commissaries where they make it by the truckload. Some independent pizzarias make their own in the store but I would guess most franchises/chains get it delivered.

No, they bake pre-made dough. It's not the greatest, but it's not reheated bread.

Pretty much all these franchise chains operate on hub and spoke for their fresh baked stuff.

The thing you buy at 6am (or 6pm, lol) was in an oven or a mixer (depending on whether the chain in question is baking on site or at the hub) at 12am that morning and on a truck at 3:30.

Also Panera.

Though I should point out that this is not baking, but simply putting premade delivered dough into an oven. The dough is baked, yes, but this is not what people mean by baking.

A bakery generally is mixing flour themselves.

From a quick web search - Subway has an often-changing network of contracted suppliers of frozen bread dough.

It's been a while since I ate there, but the bread quality was for-sure not up to "we hired a baker to elevate our sandwiches" standards.

I think you're missing the point. The bakery would have to sell "less-than-fancy" sandwiches, but the sandwich shop could sell sandwiches with bread just as good as the bakery would use.

The bakery has to become a inferior sandwich shop to make sandwiches. The sandwich shop doesn't have to become a bakery to bake just the types of bread that they need to wrap their sandwiches.

The bakery would be better off selling dough to the sandwich shop.

this whole thread is hilarious and yet quite insightful.

Yes, the core idea behind Stack Fallacy was that if you are Apple you don't need to build a better CPU than Intel for all workloads - you just need M3 for your Mac.

So yes - just one type of bread. Like Subway. Or Panera.

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