People often underestimate how much time and effort goes into small side businesses, especially when that business is creative in nature.

For one baker, what started as a favor quickly turned into frustration when her customer made the ordering and pickup process much harder than it needed to be.

Keep reading for the full story.

My first frustration from my home run bakery.

I run a small home bakery on the side of my normal full time job that specializes in iced sugar cookies. I get a lot of orders from friends and family, but I do get a good amount of business as well from strangers.

I prefer business from strangers, because I find it easier to say no/put my foot down on prices, designs, time frames, etc.

So when she receives a request from someone she knows, she hesitantly decides to take it.

Yesterday, I got a message through my bakery’s Facebook page from my step-mom’s niece, whom I also went to high school with. She asked for 18 cookies for her 5-year wedding anniversary, by Friday.

Now if this were my full time gig, that doesn’t seem unreasonable, but I do this as a side job so I still work 40+ hours a week. Also, 4th of July is tomorrow, so this is a pretty hectic week for me.

And iced sugar cookies take a good chunk of time to do. Baking the cookies in itself is easy, but the decorating takes several hours of work.

But very quickly it becomes clear this wasn’t going to be an easy client.

I asked her a few questions to see what she wanted, design wise. Her response to every question was, “IDK, Be Creative.”

This is frustrating to me because I like to make sure my customers are getting what they want, and if they don’t give me any kind of guideline, I can’t guarantee their satisfaction.

Even still, she decides to take on the order and gets to work in preparing it.

But reluctantly, I agreed to do the cookies for her and I figured I’d just test out some new designs I’ve been wanting to try.

But when she tried to coordinate pickup, she hit another snag.

I followed up by asking her when she would like to pick the cookies up. She responded around 5AM and she said Friday preferably.

I told her that was no problem, but because I work during the day, she could pick them up on Friday after 6PM from my home, and I provided her with the address.

This really wouldn’t have been that long of a drive for the client at all.

Now this is what really gets me. I live pretty close to the city, right on the northern edge of our state.

She lives no more than 30 minutes south from me.

Once I let her know that she could pick them up after 6 on Friday, she said, “I don’t know if I can make it up to the city on Friday, are you coming south this weekend?”

So she refused the customer’s request, and the fact that she even asked in the first place made her even madder.

I followed up with a firm no (I stopped delivering without charging a delivery fee), and she told me to hold off on the cookies to see if she could figure something out.

That was the second point of annoyance to me because after I got her initial message asking for the cookies, and anticipating how busy this week is going to be, I went ahead and baked the cookies last night so that I could get them completed early.

That way, I didn’t have to worry about getting them done during the July 4th festivities.

She wants to give up, but decides to just make a compromise.

At that point, I wanted to just tell her sorry, I can’t do them for you unless you can pick them up.

But I ended up telling her that the best I could do was to give the cookies to my dad (who works a few blocks away from me downtown) and that she could pick them up from his house over the weekend, which she agreed to.

The whole situation just left a sour taste in her mouth.

I’m just flabbergasted that she had the nerve to ask me to drive the cookies to her, when I’m already doing her a favor by making them for her on such short notice, with no guidance from her on what she wants.

Maybe I’m wrong to be annoyed, but I feel like if I’m doing you a favor, and taking time out of my busy holiday week to make these last minute for you, you should be willing to drive an extra 10 minutes to pick up your cookies.

This customer really had a lot of nerve expecting so many exceptions from the baker.

What did Reddit think of this customer’s audacity?

Indecisive customers are always the worst customers.

This customer was no doubt underestimating the sheer amount of work it takes to bake cookies professionally.

Perhaps more structure in her side business could help weed out these problematic patrons.

It helps to set strong boundaries early in the relationship and stick to them.

This experience left this baker wondering how far is too far to go for a client.

It’s never a good feeling when kindness is met with entitlement.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.