Gingerbread & Jingle Bells by Caro Carson

Author:Caro Carson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christmas, Holiday Romance, Small Town Romance, Sweet romance, Contemporary Romance, Texas
Publisher: Caro Carson
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

“But Grandma, they make registers nowadays that will keep track of which item you sold.”

Eve understood the charm of the ornate, brass-trimmed register, which had already been vintage when Grandma first opened the bakery in 1950. Brass charm, however, was failing to track the inventory sold. Eve understood the value of tracking inventory for steel parts for ships and trains. Bread and cookies were no different.

“I can tell what sold.” Grandma unrolled the thin strip of cash register paper upon which antique keys had printed a duplicate of every number punched into the register. “All of these twenty-nine cent purchases are plain cookies. The forty-nine cents are the decorated gingerbread men. Seventy-four cents is a loaf of white bread, seventy-six cents is a loaf of rye, seventy-nine cents is the sourdough—”

“Do you price each item uniquely, so you know what’s selling?”

“Of course. I thought you knew that. At the end of the day, I can count all the seventy-nine-cent entries, for example, if I want to know exactly how much sourdough sold. Close your mouth, dearest. You’ll catch a fly.”

“That’s so time-consuming. Sometimes that paper is eight feet long at the end of the day. A new register would sum it up for you. You could price all the bread the same, then program a different key for each variety—”

“I think I hear the bell at the back door. I’ll get it. We still receive our sugar and spice delivery on Wednesdays, same as when you were a little girl.”

Eve rolled up the paper strip and placed it back on its spindle. She hadn’t even gotten to her point about forecasting demand for various products. They knew gingerbread houses were popular from Thanksgiving onward, for example, but was it the second Saturday in December when they sold the most, or the third? Watching trends and modifying their production practices would—

“I almost completely forgot about this order.” Grandma came back from the kitchen with an index card in her hand. “Here’s the address of the new county annex building. I’m having Heather write Welcome on one of our celebration cakes right now, and then you can deliver it. Heather does a very nice job lettering, now that my hands aren’t as steady as they used to be.”

Heather was the name of the teenager who’d had a date to the movies on the Saturday Eve had arrived. Fortunately, she did indeed have an artistic flair to tilt the scale in her favor, a counterbalance to her teenage dramatics.

Eve took the card. “Who are they welcoming?”

“They run an afterschool program for the youngsters there. They’re welcoming the parents who are coming in for career day, to explain what they do for a living. I should have thought about having you volunteer as a speaker. It would be so good for the girls to see a businesswoman.”

“I don’t know how exciting I could make my career sound to children. If I’d known in advance, I might have been able to bring some pens with the company logo on them.

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