ANALYSIS: Nat made the tough call to close her bakery after pandemic burnout — and then her customers turned on her
Eleven years ago, a talented baker gathered a couple of like-minded souls around her, rented an old Victorian corner shop and opened a bakery of the kind of layered, puffed, frosted, creamy delights that you'd usually only see on the table of your just-baptised cousin.The baker, Nat Paull, and her shop, Beatrix Bakes, became a Melbourne sensation, then a national one through her best-selling baking book and she became a mini TV star with appearances on MasterChef.
Almost three years into this slowly rotating whirlpool and Nat decides that's enough. She announces that her shop is to close, and she would move onto other cake-like projects. Please enjoy, she said, the last few weeks of business.
Service providers have long had to deal with awful customer behaviour, but you're not imagining that something else has changed. Fight, flight or freeze. Here we go again: the three primal responses to threat. Faced with the anguish of losing a local sugar fix, many customers chose fight. Or maybe the pandemic really has driven some of us nuts.I asked Nat on my show to try to explain what she thought was going on; she'd just posted a stern warning on social media that if the situation became too overwhelming for her staff she may even close the doors early. We laughed that maybe all that sugar was to blame.
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