Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?
I ran a bread baking business for a year in suburban TX, and I can safely say that it doesn&#x27;t matter how good you are: profit margins are really low in certain areas. People were extremely cost sensitive. Also they often didn&#x27;t even like &quot;fancy&quot; bread, and would complain about anything different from just regular sliced grocery store foam.<p>I got pretty good, and was able to have some &quot;subscriptions&quot; back before that was a thing, delivering it to people at work, but in the end I was barely able to cover the costs once I&#x27;d factored in running the oven. I then moved to the northeast , where people care about bread a little more, but again are usually quite sensitive to convenience and price. The groceries here have average bakeries in store, and produce cheap reliable bread.<p>As for cake baking, that&#x27;s a whole different ballgame. I&#x27;ve had a friend who tried that and she had a very hard time. People typically were extremely price sensitive, and were very hard to please. It reminded me of the tattoo business: a few rockstars charging 10k for art that gets thousands of upvotes on social media, then a mass of people doing $100 specials for customers who are never quite happy. Kind of a bummer, so my friend gave up after a year and doubled down on programming as a career. She now keeps baking firmly in the &quot;hobby&quot; realm, since while she loves it, she knows it&#x27;s extremely hard to make a living doing it.