The Bakers and the Breakers
Once, there was a bakery nestled downtown in the big city. It's name was "Maker's Bakery".
For decades, almost a century, Maker's did the job of baking fresh bread for the citizens of the city. Everyone loved their bread. They would stop in every day to see what the bakers were cooking up. People near and far would travel to experience the quality of Maker's legendary bread. All-in-all, a staple of the city's history.
One day, a new bakery opened up directly next to Maker's. They went by the name of "Atria".
Atria was a trendy establishment that sold it's bread with the allure of it's new "Flash-Bread" technology. They could bake bread at 100x the speed of a normal bakery. They boasted that the quality matched that of traditional bread as well. And they sold their bread for slightly less than the bread at Maker's.
People from all over the city took a trip to Atria's. They NEEDED to try this new miracle of the modern era.
For a very small crowd of people, they agreed that Atria's bread was of impressive quality. The slightly smaller price was also enticing as well. These people began to make plans to make Atria their new bakery of choice.
For many others, they had various concerns with the quality of the bread. Some loaves seemed to have been overcooked. Others under-cooked. Some had concerning spots on them. There was one customer that found that her loaf was entirely hollow on the inside. And in general, the entire bakery had a slight... "off" smell.
The owner of Atria reassured these concerned customers that Atria is "a NEW establishment, and it will take some time to get the quirks ironed out of the 'Flash-Bread' machine." He promised that things would only get better from here.
A few months went by. Maker's Bakery began to see a small dip in customers. Concerning, but not unexpected. They had new competition, after all. They would just have to up their game and try some new things to get people to choose them over Atria.
And so they did. They experimented with new methods of preparing bread that would increase the quality, drop the time it took to bake, and make their bread stand out. This somewhat worked. Though it did little to improve their profits.
A few weeks later, the manager of Maker's noticed some interesting things.
Every time they would try a new bread recipe, Atria would have a VERY similar bread show up on their menu as well. In fact, Atria's bread seemed almost uncannily close to Maker's bread. It was slightly quirkier, but it was unquestionably taking inspiration from Maker's style.
This intrigued the manager. He wasn't sure what to make of this. Was he just being paranoid? Could it be that they both had the same good idea at the same time several times in a row? NO, of course not. It's just too much of a coincidence.
He's never seen Atria's owner visit Maker's. Atria's employees also hadn't stopped by, as far as the manager knew. Did Atria even HAVE employees? Because the manager had never seen a single employee in the last few months.
It was only a hunch. And a paranoid one at that. But the manager decided to take a VERY close look at their security footage.
The manager looked through a large amount of footage from previous nights to see if anything weird went down. What he found shook him to his core.
From the camera mounted in the back of the building, he saw a masked man sneak up to the back door and break in using a set of lock picks. The masked man proceeded to scurry in and head to the manager's office. He rummaged around in the manager's notes, and took pictures of all the newest recipes.
The manager was gobsmacked. How had NO ONE caught this before?
He had a strong suspicion of who this masked man was. However, he wanted to see it with his own eyes.
The next few nights, the manager camped out in his car across the street, around the exact same time as when the masked man had shown up before. On the third night of staking things out... there he was. The owner of Atria.
Atria's owner had exited out of the back of his bakery and quietly shuffled over to Maker's. On the short walk over, he took his mask out of his pocket and slipped it on. Seeing this, the manager got a devious idea.
"I wanna confront him head-on" thought the manager of Maker's. "I'll hide around the corner in the alley. When he sneaks out of Maker's and walks back to Atria, I'll jump out and catch him in the act."
The manager got out of his car and positioned himself in the alley, ready to spook Atria's owner out of his shoes.
As expected, Atria's owner exited Maker's and began walking back.
"HEY!!!" screamed the manager.
Atria's owner jumped in surprise. He then quickly ran back towards Atria and hopped back inside. Not wanting to lose his chance, the manager followed and quickly grabbed the backdoor before the owner could lock it behind him.
Atria's owner sped his way through the corridor to get away from Maker's manager. The manager followed close behind, not breaking nearly as much of a sweat as the owner was. The two of them made it into the kitchen.
"STOP RIGHT THE-" screamed Maker's manager. But he was stopped by the horror of what he was witnessing.
Inside this kitchen was not an oven. Not a stove. Not baking utensils. Not even a microwave oven.
Computers with scanners, printers, fans going off at full blast. Technology that was far outside what most people could comprehend.
The screens were plastered with all manner of bread recipes. Some were familiar to the manager, as they were recipes from other competing bakeries across the state. There had to have been recipes from all over the nation in this system.
The manager noticed that one of the computer screens... had HIS recipe on it. The recipe for one of his loaves of bread. Specifically, last week's special. And sitting in the printer bed of that system... was bread. A copy of HIS bread. A copy that had several gross flaws in it, but a copy nonetheless.
"You- ....you ....clone bread here." the manager said.
"...yes. Yes I do." replied Atria's owner.
"...do you ...do you even have a staff here?" the manager asked.
"...no. " said the owner. "My cloning machine makes it so that I can operate here without any staff. That allows me to sell bread at a much cheaper cost."
"Not MUCH cheaper" joked the manager. "Your bread prices are, what, a few cents off from my prices? Not exactly a bargain. Plus, you got some nerve to sell bread THAT expensive when it isn't even real bread."
"A lot of people don't know the difference." replied the owner. "And hey, that leaves most of the profits for me and my company."
"Well, dream of those profits all you want. You won't have much profit after I get you arrested and sue the pants off of you!" yelled the manager.
"Oh come on." said the owner. "Is that really necessary? Do you really think you even have a case? I'm making faux bread based on some recipes. It's not like you're the ONLY person who gets to make bread. You're just being selfish."
"SELFISH?!" screamed the manager. "None of this is your work! It's the work of hundreds of other bakers around the country! Including ME!
I spent YEARS learning how to make bread! And then YOU come along, steal the recipes I'm experimenting with, shove it into your computer, and make a profit off of it?! And even if you were handing it out for FREE, you're still grifting me and undercutting my business! Have you ever actually baked bread even ONCE in your life?!"
"HEY!" yelled the owner. "I'll have you know that I know exactly how to make bread! I just don't have the skills and expertise to do it as fast as YOU can. My skills fall into the tech sector. And I choose to flex THAT. I don't think YOU would ever understand that."
"Everything you sell is fake!" said the manager. "It's all a bunch of dolled-up starch balls! Do you think you're really gonna get away with screwing over real bakeries with your trash?"
"I already am, buddy." the owner huffed. "Maybe you missed it, but the world's changing around you. This is the future. You can't stop innovation, no matter how hard you try. You either adapt, or die out.
Tell you what. I'm not a scumbag. And I want everyone to join me in my vision of NEW BREAD. So you're free to use my equipment any time you want. Take notes on it even. Build an exact copy of it in your bakery. I'm not selfish like YOU."
The manager looked at Atria's owner with a look of confusion, disgust, and rage. "Take notes. ....take notes on screwing over other businesses to suit your own? Tearing down other people so that YOU can benefit? Use equipment that's as nasty and soulless as a rotting corpse?"
"Hey, if you don't wanna innovate, that's fine." mocked the owner. "Just don't come crying to me when my industry blows passed you and makes normal bakeries obsolete.
OH, but if you wanna avoid becoming obsolete, might I recommend a new industry? I hear Italian restaurants are BIG nowadays. They got bread in them, so you'll probably feel right at home. And from what I've heard from tech experts, Italian dishes won't be clonable for at least another decade. Probably. Tech moves fast, so I might be off one or two years. But HEY, there's plenty of room for variety in Italian food. Should be a safer bet than a bakery."
The manager stared, dumbfounded. ".....you want me to stop baking bread... let your awful machines take it over... and move over to a food business that I REALLY don't care about? Spend another decade of my life perfecting a completely different culinary field? All to have your tech friends come crush that too?"
"Yeah!" said the owner. "Now you're getting it!"
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