Real-Life Decision Making
It's the day before St. Valentine's Day, one of the biggest days in the baking business. You are spending the afternoon getting ready for the sweetheart rush tomorrow morning. Your little bakery has been a popular choice for beautiful, tasty Valentine sweets for years and you expect this year will be no different. You've got lots of work ahead of you.
You begin by preparing the cakes and pastries and then move on to the sugar cookies. These are your biggest seller on Valentine's Day because of the beautiful icing decorations you put on them.
You've mixed up the dough for the cookies, and are just pulling the last batch of pastries out of the bakery oven when disaster strikes. From the looks of the pastries, which are cooked on the top but soggy on the bottom, there is something wrong with your oven. The bottom element of the oven is burned out, so your pastries have cooked unevenly.
You've called the appliance technician and he is unable to fix your oven until tomorrow afternoon, much too late to help you with the Valentine's Day rush. Now you've really got a tough decision on your hands.
You could bake the cookies in the bakery oven anyway. They will get a little burned on the top, but you could cover up that up with icing. It's the decorations people really love about the cookies, so your clients might not even notice.
Or, you could rush home with the cookies and bake them in your oven there. Since this oven is so much smaller than the bakery oven, you will probably be up all night making the cookies, but they're important to your business.
Finally, you could skip the cookies this year. All of your pastries, cakes and breads look as beautiful as ever and people might not even notice the absence of the Valentine's Day cookies.
What are you going to do?