Friday 11 November 2016

Scrumptious, with a little extra something....

In the OOFS (Out OF Favour Shop) there is a little (teeny, miniscule) café, and in the café there is cake; delicious, homemade cake crafted by independent local bakers.

Photo: lagrafika: Pixabay
At least, that’s how it started off. Unfortunately, TBE’s (aka The Boss Erratic’s) attention to detail being what it is, the cake very quickly became less homemade and more mass made. Basically, it now comes from the local supermarket. And if anyone asks if the cake is homemade (which they do), I have to tell them, “It’s sourced locally.” Great, eh?

Being (secretly) shop bought, the cake has a ‘use by’ date, and being (not so secretly) too small to swing an irritating boss in, the café has few customers, so there is often lots of cake leftover by the, ‘use by,’ date. This has to be thrown out.

Or does it?

TBE discovered that out of date cake was often still basically fresh. So she started doctoring the ‘use by’ date on the back of the description label.

It was only extended by a few days at first.

Then perhaps a week.

A week and a half.

Now, it is quite usual for a ‘use by,’ date to be extended by a good two weeks. Urgh!

But worse, because TBE has a habit of obliterating the original, ‘use by,’ date written on the back of the label, nobody is quite sure exactly how old the cake actually is anymore. I think this might be my fault; I always ensure the original, ‘use by,’ date (if I know it) is written next to the extended one, and if the cake is too far out of date, I always throw it out. I’m annoying like that. I am quite the trouble maker.

And the result of trying to flog stale cake of unknown age?

Mould.

Yep, more than once I’ve inspected a cake on display to find mould all along the bottom. Maybe it’s a new TBE tactic: protein as well as sugar. I reckon she’d try to charge more for that.
 
Photo: Meditations: Pixabay
Of course, Health and Safety would just be all over this. So the moral of the story is; look after your staff because there is always a risk that one disgruntled employee could call the local Health and Safety department and blow the whistle. Wouldn’t that be just desserts? Sweet retribution (certainly sweeter than the cake).

Except you can’t actually do this anonymously.

I checked.

Damn.

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