is anyone else experiencing this ? when i put the bakers station in my sims house, the game starts to lag (not super bad) but noticeably, like things are going a bit slower. has anyone else experienced this? and i'm not even going to use the ea made bakery venue. it's lag central.

Nah ... I read something about routing issues around the register and such, that may cause lag. I made my own bakery and it's not lagging as I see from my testing. Someone put up a halfwall behind the glass counter for the pastery to make it work. Lots of complaining about EA not having tested the lot ... as usual.

I placed one in the house of the sims I was playing last weekend, and did not have any lag from it.

No... When I place the bakers station on a custom lot it works like it should. On the other hand, When it come to the register I get the occasional "Hired and automatically Fired" every time when I hire an NPC. So I let my playable Sims to tend the register instead.