I worked in kitchens for 10 years. It's not that the task of making anything is all that difficult. It's that it takes practice to do able to bake 120 loaves of bread the same way, every night, getting it right the first time.
Wasting ingredients even a fairly small percentage of the time get's really expensive. This is one of those cases where a server with 90% up-time is easy, but 99.999% is really really hard.
What I don't think people get is it's no big deal to fail say 15% of the time at home. But, bakery margins are really tight and they can't afford that kind of failure regularly.
I worked it a fancy bakery for a couple of months when I was 18. The place supplied smaller hotels and an upmarket high-street café.
The finished cakes sell to retailers for about £20. I was just a temp worker, but the chef who supervised me clearly understood where quality ingredients were necessary, and where they could take shortcuts. For example, some recipes called for a branded liqueur to be used, whilst others used a no-name vodka + fruit essence mix.
The quality was miles ahead of anything available from a supermarket or ordinary bakery. I offended my mum by refusing to say her baking was better. (But my parents couldn't have afforded the kinds of places this factory supplied.)
I was surprised by how incapable some of the other low-paid staff were. Simple tasks like "arrange 6 half-strawberries like this in a hexagon on the cake" or "put one dollop of mix into the tray" were regularly messed up.
You get what you pay for. Qualified, hard working people demand a living wage. If you can't pay that you get whatever is left over after every other employer takes his pick.
This is so true. Because labor is not a commodity, some folks forget that the rules of demand and supply work both ways for labor, just as they do for widgets.
