I agree with most of your key points but having worked in the restaurant business for quite a few years, the donut shop analogy got me thinking... perhaps the difficulty in procuring the pastry is intentional? Different products within the bakery/shop have different profit margins. Sometimes a shop will stock items that they believe will bring folks inside their store to browse around to shop and spend their money. But with so many different items within the store for sale, there are probably certain ones that the proprietor of the store try to "push", (due to relationships with vendors, stocking availability, ease of sale, etc) Maybe those particular donuts have a low profit margin which in turn causes management to not act upon this bottleneck of efficiency with a sense of urgency?