> This process of wringing out excess capacity makes sense if you are operating a typical business.<p>Does it, though? The actual literature I’ve seen on the topic seems to take a far more nuanced view.<p>> If you run a bagel shop, you don't want to have extra bagels lying around at the end of every day.<p>Sounds like a straw man. Bagels, being highly perishable, doesn’t make sense to pile up. The alternative to “wringing out excess capacity” would rather be to reduce batch sizes at the cost of set-up and clean-up time in order to better adapt to variations in demand.