What do you tell a customer when they come to you with a picture of a cake they love and want you to make but it would serve WAAYYYY too many people?  I have a customer that came to me with a picture of a 3-tier baby shower cake, but they only want it to feed about 25 people.  All the tiers are different (one with buttercream roses, one with chevrons and one plain with cute little characters and a banner on it) so it's not like you can just cut one out.  Do you try to get them to maybe just cut out one tier or still charge them for the full cake, etc?  I just don't know the proper way to explain it.  It seems to happen more often than not that the customer wants some big cake, but only wants it to feed a small amount of people so they don't want to pay for the large cake.  Help!!  Thanks!!!

You can tell them what the picture will feed.  You can explain if they want the look you can do styrofoam dummies for some of the tiers.    There will not be much of a change in price because outside of not baking you still need to purchase the dummies and decorate them.

And funny (?) enough the price doesn't change much (for me) if it's down sized to let's say a 4-6-8" with less height as the per hour time is not much different. But in people's mind quarter size = quarter price. Fiddling tiny cut outs onto a microscopic cake calls for an additional charge LOL

^^Amen!

This happens much more now than ever before because of the internet and the evils of Pinterest.  You have to learn to be brutal and put it back on them.  Explain the cake is much larger than they require, you can make the cake in the photo but it will serve XXXX people, many more than the 25 they have coming to the party and they will have to pay for a lot of extra cake if they want that size.  If they want a smaller cake let them decide what tier they want to delete, that is not your decision to make.  Making a dummy tier does not save them much money at all, especially if it is a fondant finished cake with lots of decoration.  A whole lot of the cost of a cake like that is in the decoration/time not the actual baking of the cake.

I get this at least a couple of times a week I don't waste time anymore just lay it on the line.  In my experience 99.9% of the time they don't want to pay for a whole lot of extra cake so they go with a cheaper version.