Bakery Bans Photography

A reader wrote to Jen at Cake Wrecks that the bakery at her local supermarket has a new policy prohibiting photography. She heard that it was because the management was afraid the cakes would show up on "that bad cake site." In fact, store employees said it was because their cake designs were copyrighted. That does seem like a logical response; far more logical than hiring professionals or training cake decorators.

Of course this bakery isn't the only chain to ban photos; fact is, most stores now have similar rules. I hear from readers every week who are harassed, shooed away, and even outright kicked out of stores for whipping out their cellphones in the bakery.

Now, far be it from me to criticize rules (even ones I find really, REALLY stupid) but I don't see how harassing your own customers  - and ones who often buy your wrecks because Cake Wrecks has made them a world-wide inside joke - is good for business.

Then again, I also thought it would make more sense to train your bakers not to make wrecks instead of trying to prevent people from seeing them, so what do I know?

There are more photographic examples in the post at Cake Wrecks. Link


Comments (2)

Newest 2
Newest 2 Comments

And as she says in the linked article, there's no way to prevent someone from buying a cake, taking it home, and photographing it all they want. Which is how Cake Wrecks gets a lot of their pictures.
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Not only stupid; impossible to enforce. What are they going to do when someone takes a picture, throw them to the floor and take away their phone? You know, from the person who is a paying customer.
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I grew up in a household that had every Galaxy and Astounding from the 50s and quite a few Astounding from the 40s. I had the privilege of reading Asimov's stories in their original format. Recommendations from 1945 to today: Asimov's collection of short stories originally published as Nightfall and Other Stories, Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Card's Speaker for the Dead.

Anything by those three are good, many are great. These are just my favorites.
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I have to agree with your choices 100%. I would like to add two of my old favorite short stories. The first is "For A Breath I Tarry" by Roger Zelazny. That one got a bit of press because of its influence on the film Wall-E. The other is "5,271,009" by Alfred Bester. I used to have copies I would loan to people who were curious about science fiction.
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I've always had a weakness for Asimov's story "The Last Question." I saw it produced as a planetarium show when I was small and just the memory of it still gives me chills.
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