A Bakery's Arithmetic

Abstract

The ovens at a regional bakery are lit at four. By six the first vans are loaded for the cafés and grocers on the morning route, and by nine the owner is at a small desk above the packing floor with a pencil and last year's accounts. She is sixty-one. She has no children who want the business, two offers from larger competitors on the desk, and a question she has been circling for a year: whether the people downstairs could own it. She is a composite, built for teaching, and so is her bakery. Every figure that describes the firm in this chapter was set by the writer to be plausible and round enough to follow; none describes a real company. Every figure that describes the research comes from a cited, published source, and the notes give each one. The point of putting the two side by side is the one Ammanuel Santa Anna makes about this whole field in his notes on finance: "This isn’t naive idealism—it’s systems theory with a balance sheet." A balance sheet is what this chapter is for.