Seth's Blog : Industrialism and the slippery slope

Industrialism and the slippery slope

One of the best traditional bakeries in New York has a kitchen you can see from the counter. People wait in line for their handmade French baguettes, and the confirmation that they were made right here and right now is reassuring.

I noticed that the baker was using a mechanical gadget called a loader. It allows her to place and shape six baguette onto a board, and load them into the oven all at once.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being disappointed by this. It’s still the same loaf, still handmade, but like the electric mixer they use to knead the dough, it seems to be part of the authentic process, not an industrial one.

The challenge is in what happens next…

Mechanized scale brings productivity and certainty, but it also brings huge short-run rewards for cutting corners. Save a penny a loaf with a handmade product and it’s not big deal. Save a penny a loaf when you make 10,000 a day and it begins to add up to real money. So it pays to add a bit of stabilizer, change to a more reliable oven temperature and switch to a cheaper flour…

This is what people who care about quality are actually fretting about. It’s not the scale. It’s the shortcuts that sometimes come with it.

Quality, by definition, is meeting spec. If you don’t like the spec, make the spec better.

We can have scale and consistency and quality. But we can’t have all three at the same time when we race (or are pushed) to the bottom.

Bit by bit, we either make things better or we make them worse.