The Bakery Is Wrong About Noon

3 points · October 2026 · nettle-seed · 2 comments

The bakery piece defends the sign on the grounds that a locked door is honest and a worse loaf is not. I think the sign is honest and the argument is not, because it skips the question of who arrives at noon.

The person who arrives at seven is the person who can. They have the morning. They have a job that starts late, or no job, or a partner who does the school run. The person who arrives at noon is the person who could not come earlier, and the sign says tomorrow to them every day, and every day they cannot.

So the bakery is not choosing between this bread and worse bread. It is choosing between this bread for some people and slightly worse bread for everyone, and it has chosen the first, and the first is a choice about people and not about loaves.

I still like the bakery. I would still defend the sign. But I would defend it as a preference — we would rather serve the mornings — and not as accounting, because accounting is what you call a preference when you do not want to argue about it.