Cycle complete!
This past week I turned up in Karlsruhe, South West Germany to stay at a friends house for the night. However upon arriving at the door and ringing the doorbell I didn't receive any answer. We had the time agreed and all but unfortunately he wasn't around at this time. Anyhow I set off to find someone who had a phone with which to call him (my phone is setup for wifi when I'm abroad but not for calling or texting.
My friends house was in a suburb just outside the city and the hamlet there was almost devoid in the way of shops or people who I could approach to ask for help. I found a bakery however and asking 'sprecken tu engels?' I was fortunately met with a smile and an affirmative 'Yes'. And so I asked if I could use her phone to call my friend. She said that would be no problem at all and so handed me the phone. I called, but the number I was given seemed to be wrong when it would not ring. Anyhow with time on my hands and no one else in the shop I struck up conversation on the economics of running a bakery. With the finance background I always find it interesting to learn of how different businesses are run, so a bakery was a new one for me. I asked for how long they would leave the breads and the cakes on the shelves for? For her (and as I imagine is the case in most bakeries) it was one day for the bread and 2 days for the cakes. This meant that whatever stock was leftover would be thrown out or sold into a secondary market (to another shop) for very little. When I cast my eyes onto the shelves, this looked like an extraordinary amount given they were half full and it being 4pm in the afternoon. When you think of the pricing strategy bakers must use when pricing their loaves of bread or their sugary cakes, one large factor in this must be how much waste they expect me their to be. For if one creates 10 loaves of bread at a total cost of €1.50 each (10x€1.50=€15) and sells them for €2, but only sells 6, then he will make a loss will he not? (6x€2=€12). If this continues then the baker must raise his prices or he can cut production to a level that he believes will match demand for the day. But this is another sticky problem that leads me onto the next point. How does a baker create the right balance of not baking too much nor cooking too little on any given day? This is a dilemma that perhaps German bakers face more often than in other countries, as my baker friend explained to me. "Customers always ask is the bread still warm? But it only stays warm for 30 minutes once out of the oven. Some of my customer won't buy anything if it's not warm and so will leave for the other bakery down the road. Throughout the day I will make batches so that it's as fresh as possible." Sadly even this is not enough for some customers. The other problem associated with creating only just enough bread to meet demand is that often the shelves can look empty. And as we all know when we look for bread or cakes and see only one or 2 left, we are inclined to think that it must be 'old' or that it's 'the worst of the bunch and so was left there intentionally by others.' This my friend explained is another problem of running a bakery in that customers will hesitate to buy something of which the shelf is not plentiful off already. So if there's leftover bread at the end of the day why not give it to the poor? This was a question that without me asking, seemed to immediately raise its head based on our thread of conversation. It so happened that she had tried this already. That at the end of the day, a poor man came in looking for old bread. She acquiesced to him simply on a feeling of pity giving him some bread and thought no more of it till the next day. Next day there was a queue of impoverished people waiting for the shop to close. This she said was unsustainable for two reasons: 1. The image that you have of people of multiple social, drink, drug related problems sitting outside your shop does not lend itself to a healthy image to passing or potential customers, therefore reducing sales. 2. It also doesn't help sales if people know they can get it free by waiting till the end of the day. In this way, being generous was detrimental to the business. And so that concluded my brief but interesting introduction into the running of a German bakery. It's a tough world getting up at 4am and trying to balance pyroduction with demand for products that are low value and only profitable in volume. Perhaps we should be more appreciative to small bakeries who must balance so much to give us our daily loaves of bread.
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This is Rupert, and on my first day in Germany he invited me to pull over and share a coffee with him (in the end he absolutely insisted I also eat a pastry and sandwich at his expense!) We had met on the road on his way to work and chatted away for 10 minutes, discussing various things from his family to what I was doing on the road. From this he postponed his work by a half hour to just hang out at the cafe. I knew that he would surely have to make this up in the evening, given he worked an 8 hour day but that didn't stop him from taking the time to spend time and engage with a foreigner.
To be honest to me that's worth more than the food, albeit I really appreciated the decent breakfast! Time. It appears so precious to us that sometimes we can't let anything get in the way of our daily routine. We must be here by a certain time, or I can't help you out because I've something else 'more important' to do. Understandably there are situations where these excuses are entirely valid and appropriate, but think of all those times when they're not? We're all guilty of it, I included. Am I really too busy to call in and say hello to my grandparents? Perhaps you may be their only visitor all day. Or when you finish dinner only to go down to your room and scroll through your Facebook account for the 10th time that day. Could you instead have used that time to help mum wash up. (Hope my mum doesn't read this and expect great things from me!) Anyhow they're are so many opportunities where perhaps we could be more generous with our time. For me Rupert has illustrated this so well in sacrificing his time to make me feel welcome in his country, and a comparable country to Ireland at that, in its western ways. Perhaps we can all learn from his example. Was a while ago since it happened but thought I'd share with you a rather unusual, embarrassing/awkward moment, one that most people probably won't face all too often. It occurred in Serbia in the capital Belgrade, where I visited the Nikolas Tesla museum. For those of you who don't know him, Tesla was a Serbian inventor/genius who transformed the way we live our lives, mainly through the invention of Alternating Current and Transformers, both of which have changed little today, even over 100 years later.
It was July and height of the tourist season when I visited. The museum is located in a fairly average sized house where it holds all sorts of inventions and information relating to Tesla's life, work and vision. Every hour there was a slideshow and a tour given explaining his inventions and giving practical demonstrations on how they work, and so the 60 or so people in my group were all crammed around each invention. Then it came to a large 2.5 metre high transformer which when turned on would send electricity throughout the room. Now for those who know me well, I have the unusual installation of a defibrillator in my chest (long story!), which means that anything magnetic or electrical I usually have to stay away from. A good example of this is scanners at airport security which I have to go around for fear of the defib going off. In some countries they haven't heard of this and in China I had to bare my chest to prove that I did have something there! (Their overly Chinese reactions to it were priceless I must say.) Now there isn't much embarrassment at airports, people take notice, but I'm so used to it now it doesn't really bother me. However going back to the situation at the Tesla museum, we were in this compact room, with only our guide talking, otherwise the room was quiet. Just before he turns on the transformer he pops the question routinely asking if anyone has a pacemaker or defib, in order that they may leave the room for safety purposes. The way he asked it sounded like the way an air hostess will run through the safety procedures at the beginning of a flight. It's part of the routine that must be done even though it's almost entirely unlikely it will ever be needed. For him I'm sure having anyone with a defib visit would be rare enough and so when I shouted out "yes", 60 pairs of eyes craned their necks in my direction to see who this was. As you may well be able to imagine, those next 30 seconds were one of the most awkward silences I've ever experienced as I excused my way through the masses and into a room nearby, well away from the transformer. He then proceeded to turn on the device of which I could see from my position, and it was fascinating to watch the electricity fly through the air, like lightning, to a neon light he held nearby. Afterwards I rejoined the group, mingling in at the back. I guess that rules out me becoming an electrician so! Austria has some stunning lakes in the low alpine regions and so when I came across this bit of decking under the sun, and surrounded by crystal clear water, it was hard not to just chill here with a book.
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The AuthorName: Daniel Ross Top Tips:
1. Constantly challenge yourself. 2. If you never try you'll never know what's possible. Archives
October 2016
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