Why Can't We Charge Like Mechanics Or Lawyers???
Decorating By katerpillrgrl Updated 24 Feb 2010 , 6:58am by itsacake
Price per serving is not common practice here in Australia (in fact, I've never seen it). I personally think that there would be far fewer "sticker shock" complaints here in the forums if your clients know why they're being charged what they're being charged. Personally, when I give a quote for a cake the client gets a basic breakdown of:
cake cost
sundry materials
delivery fee
labour cost
total
I've never had someone say that I was charging too much once they see that a lot of the final cost comes from my labour - they know that it takes a long time (relatively) to make a cake. FYI I charge $20/hour for my labour.
Let's say you order a cake from me that is going to be 100 servings and I told you it would be $800.00 or $8.00 per slice. If you then come back and tell me you only need 90 servings, I'm going to tell you that you might as well take the 100 servings because since the decorations, the time, the overhead etc. are all the same the price per servings would go up to $8.80 per serving and you would save almost nothing. Better to have a little extra cake.
If the only thing changing for me is that I will spend $20.00 less on ingredients, then you don't get $80.00 off. That is not the way this is supposed to work.
Not logical. Most of the time, you cant substitute a cake size to reduce it by 10 servings. Brides Need cake for 100 they get and pay for cake for 115 because thats how the serving chart comes out.
I had someone who wanted a sheet cake. The 11x15 serves 35 and I told her that. She said, Can you make one that only serves 30? what the heck did she want me to do, slice 2 off of the end, drop it in the trash and NOT charge her for it? I told her, If you dont want any leftover cake, you can just cut them bigger. (dumba$$)
This whole discussion is just semantics anyway. Charging by the slice is just a method to get a uniform unit of measure. Charge a fee for the cake if you want, but if you divide the cost by the number of servings, you have a cost-per-serving whether you know it (or acknowledge it) or not.
(Here comes the history teacher in me!) It was Andrew Carnegie who implemented the unit cost of measurement in the iron/steel factories so he could determine a unit cost for the process, rather than wait until the end of the project or the end of the year to see if he made any money or not (which was the practice at the time). By knowing his unit costs for each portion of the job, he could see if he was on track for a loss or for a profit, and could make any corrections at that moment, in that part of the process immediately.
A baker who charges by the cake should really stop and do a price-per-slice analysis now and then to see if the pricing is all over the board or if its running consistent. If the per-unit-cost (cost per serving) and per-unit-price (for similar design/style cakes, of course) is/are all over the board, I would worry about inconsistent pricing procedures and structures, and would really look at the profit/loss probabilities.
We look at our expenses by a standard unit of measure (cost of a cup of flour; cost of a tsp of vanilla). Why wouldnt we want to know our costs/price on a standard unit of measure also?
Bottom line its all semantics. Call it what you what, but we by-the-slice people have a price-per-cake (just do the math using the times symbol) and the by-the-cake-people have a price-per-slice (just do the math using the divided by symbol).
Yes, of ourse you are correct, Debi. I didn't explain well. I more meant that a smaller cake is not necessarily less expensive. A 14 inch and a 12 inch decorated in the same way may be about the same price because the price is more in the complexity of the design than in the cake ingredients. The price per serving will be higher for the smaller cake.
If I quote $6.00 per serving for a 14 inch cake, which is 78 servings, that is $468.00. If they then decide they want only a 12 inch cake with the same decorations, which is 56 servings, they don't get it for $6.00/serving because my time stays almost the same. I go back and recalculate and let's say it will cost me $44.00 less because I need 22 fewer servings and smaller boards and box. I therefore still want to charge $424.00 for that cake, so the price is now $7.57 per serving. That is why I say prices start at xx per serving.
And, of course, I can only make cake in the sizes for which I have pans--you can have a little more than you need or a little less. You decide. I find the Wilton chart is useful to create my prices, but I'm likely to quote for the cake and then say this is xx standard servings which comes to xx per slice so they can compare other quotes.
I haven't been doing this long enough to be sure my pricing is always consistent, but I'm following Ron Ben Israel's (and many others) pattern of pricing individually by size and complexity of design. I don't charge a price for each flower or each figure, it is always by overall design, although in my head I know that it takes so long to do a bow or a ribbon, or a penguin, or whatever, so I need to add that into my calculations. Labor is the most expensive part of the thing, then overhead, then ingredients.
Does that make more sense?
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