Flour Shop — Restaurant in Bethlehem

It pains me to write this review. I’ve enjoyed and supported this business for many years. However, recently, I’ve discovered the “dark side” of this business and it’s owner. The business is scamming each and every customer by “padding” each and every transaction. If you are not familiar with the term “padding”, this is how it works. A customer comes in and selects, for example, four items. The counter employee says the bill total is $16.00, but the actual bill total is just $15.00. So the bill, in this example, was “padded” by overcharging the customer one dollar. The way they get away with this is that they rely on the fact that customers don’t “do the math” in their head to calculate the actual total, so when the bill is padded, the customer is none the wiser. The first time this happened to me I thought the counter employee made an honest mistake. The second time, I became skeptical. The third time, I was sure something was awry. Then I began documenting each and every padded transaction. After getting ripped off numerous times, I confronted the owner about the latest transaction at hand and she returned a dollar to me without even checking the counter employee’s math or my math. Immediately I suspected that she knew what was going on and that she was directing the scam. Then I didn’t go back for a couple of months and then this morning I went back and my bill was padded once again. Today there were two new/different counter employees vs. last time. That tells me that the owner is, in fact, directing the scam because someone had to train the new employees on how to pad the bills. Because I’ve documented the “padded transactions” many times, I have irrefutable proof that this is a continuous and ongoing scam. The owner may also be overcharging more than a dollar per transaction, especially if the bill is a large one with numerous items being purchased. As if all of my many documented padded transactions weren’t bad enough, how many times over the years was I ripped off and not even aware of the scam? Oh, and by the way, this is not only happening at the Linden Street store, but also at the Easton Farmers Market stall. I’m writing this because I don’t want well intentioned, innocent, hard-working people to get scammed like me. With inflation, food is already expensive, so to add to the “food cost burden” by scamming people, well, that’s just despicable. I’ve been exposed to crime several times in my life and it’s always been difficult to face the consequences of the activities of dishonest and ill-intentioned people. Evil exists in the world, we’ve all seen it, but somehow you always think “I won’t be a victim of crime” or it “doesn’t happen where I live.” So it’s particularly disheartening and disturbing to find a common criminal in a local bakery of all places scamming unsuspecting people day in and day out. She cheats loyal customers with a smile on her face. And she continues to do it, without remorse, even after she’s been exposed and confronted with the scam. It just sickens me. Yes, some people have a bright smile but they have a black heart. I guess we all now know where the owner got the money to buy her big new baking oven! Don’t support this...

Hi,

We recently purchased an Italian Rum cake from The Flour Shop. I am from Boston and wanted a cake that resembled or tasted similar to the cakes that I am accustomed to from New York or Boston. Unfortunately, as much as we tried to describe the cake to the staff, the end product tasted nothing like the Italian Rum cakes we desired. First, the cake is supposed to be soaked in rum. There was barely any run taste whatsoever in the cake - it almost tasted like a slight rum extract was used. In fact, the people that tried it couldn’t taste any rum. Also, maybe this was our fault for not describing better – but the butter cream wasn’t what we expected. The Boston and New York Italian rum cakes usually have a confectionary based butter cream icing. This cake’s icing had a very heavy (seems like it was made with real cream) texture and was not that good in our opinion. The staff was nice and we tried a multi-grain bread – which was very good. However, based on this experience, we would not purchase a rum cake from them again. Also, just to note, the cake was not inexpensive costing $30 for a 6" cake - although from a quantity standpoint, it was a very high cake (height-wise) and therefore not a bad value if one was just looking at quantity alone. I just want to add that other products that they sell looked very good and probably are good. Besides the bread, which was real good, we will try something...

In Aug. I need a cake for my daughter’s baptism so I Google bakeries near me and found this bakery. When picking the cake I noticed there was cake showing at the top of cake (cross shaped) as well as other noticeable mistakes. I politely asked the decorator if he could fix it for me and gave me a really hard time about it. He said "It's the back of the cake so I didn’t think it mattered"..."If I try to fix it I may make it worse". I mean really??!! Not to mention the fondant bow on my cake looked like play dough? He was able to somewhat cover up the cake. Although he gave me a hard time the cake tasted good and my guest were pleased. So I decided to call back and give it a second chance for my daughter’s first birthday. I spoke with what seemed to be a concerned lady and was will to make up for my inconvenience and said she would give me a discount on this cake. I asked if there were any other decorators and she said no. So while discussing prices and design ideas for this cake I was later told that the discount they were going to give me would not be $50 off the cake but $10 dollars off?? I tried making my daughter’s cake as simple as possible for the decorator not to screw this one up and she said to me "If you are so worried about him screwing up the cake why do you want to get it done here then?" WHT? That's PROFESSIONALISM?? So I replied "Never mind" and hung up....