More Cupcakes Coming?

Right after New Year's Day, I heard that pies are the new cupcakes, and cupcakes are dead.

But have rumors of the cupcake's demise been grossly exaggerated?  The New York Times reported today that Crumbs Bake Shop, a New York-based corporated cupcakerie, is going public -- and expanding.  Crumbs currently operates 34 stores across the country, from California to Illinois to New York, and it has plans to expand to 200!

If that happens, then Pittsburgh will have to look to some metric other than the Cupcake Class to measure its upwards aspirations.  Because $4 cupcakes will be everywhere -- if they aren't already.

CNN Misses the Boat

CNN.com covers the cupcake boom and misses the Cupcake Class entirely. High-priced cupcakes aren't just food. They're Veblen goods.

Pittsburgh Tech Falling Behind?

Pittsburgh may be grabbing some quick headlines with the push to snag Google-based broadband IT, but Pittsburghers know that the surest way to the region's heart is through its stomach, not its ISPs.

And on that score, Pittsburgh's leading edge - its Cupcake Class - may be falling behind the tech curve.

Montreal's Clever Cupcakes is offering cupcakes with edible QR Codes that work - the codes point to the Montreal Science Center. Check them out at left.

An earlier version of the Clever Cupcake QR code pointed to the company's website.

Why didn't Pittsburgh think of that? The ball is in the Burgh's cupcake court.

Photo attribution:http://www.flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/ / CC BY 2.0

(H/T BoingBoing and kuriositas)

Après the Cupcake: Pittsburgh's Deluge?

A couple of years ago, I fostered a silly little idea, or perhaps I just helped to foist it on a Pittsburgh public that was willing to digest this sort of thing: The emergence of Pittsburgh cupcakeries CoCo's and Dozen signaled the rise of a Floridian "Cupcake Class" in Pittsburgh, "[p]eople with the time, money, and taste to consume small portions of upscale baked goods." Longtime readers will remember that the Cupcake Class (the term itself was coined by Chris Briem) was my answer to the Custard Class, a long-ago Pittsblog comment on the relative absence of dynamism and diversity in the dessert economy.

The alleged point of the Cupcake Class was this: So long as Pittsburghers loved their fancy cupcakes, the city was on the path to prosperity. Rich Florida himself got in on the action, making a somewhat serious argument that linked cupcake demand to the supply of "creatives" that move cities in new directions. Unfortunately, that somewhat serious argument builds on the work of economist Robert Lucas, who is decisively skewered today by Paul Krugman's summary of the failures of economic theory.

Krugman has nothing to say about cupcakes, but the economics of cupcakes -- and of the Cupcake Class -- remain in the forefront of media minds. There is something about $4 pastries that focuses our attention -- or that sells newspapers. The Post-Gazette was nearly breathless in its coverage of Dozen's recent Downtown expansion. And the paper cooed its way to publishing a flattering recent account of the tulip cupcake mania that still grips New York City. I have no doubt that a G-20 journalist somewhere is writing about Pittsburgh's cupcakes as a sign of the city's renaissance.

Slate.com is now in on the action, and it more or less gets the point: the cupcake bubble must end; the cupcake crash is coming. Cupcakeries are one-trick ponies, and as everyone has jumped into the post-Sex and the City/Magnolia pond, the market has changed. The value proposition starts to change. Successful cupcake bakers are expanding (rather than innovating) in order to stay ahead of the pack, and they are at risk of losing their edge. It's one thing to market cupcakes-baked-with-love-in-the-back-of-the-store; it is something else entirely to market cupcakes-baked-with-love-at-some-faceless-facility-and-trucked-to-the-store. Why would the Cupcake Class go for that? When cupcakes are commodities, why not buy them from Paddy Cake or Giant Eagle? With the recession, $4 cupcakes are being repositioned as "affordable luxuries," but that's the discredited rhetoric of homo economicus, people making rational judgments about when and how to spend. As The Economist pointed out recently, even branded consumer goods are taking major hits right now. People are trading down; affordable "luxuries" are still luxuries. The cupcake bubble will pop. The cupcake fad will pass.

Does that mean anything for Pittsburgh? Slate.com is offering the truth behind the Cupcake Class (I wrote about it once before): This isn't a story about a city's emergent success with income distribution or "creatives." It's a story about entrepreneurship and what it takes to build a durable company out of a clever idea. Cupcakes come, and cupcakes will go. If Pittsburgh's cupcakeries are going to stick around -- and of course, may they live long, and prosper -- then they have to find more things to bake and sell than $4 pastries. The good news is that in Pittsburgh, it looks like this is actually happening.

Is Pittsburgh a post-cupcake city? We're ahead of the national curve? That, not "Pittsburgh has $4 cupcakes," really would be news that a G-20 journalist could sink some teeth into.

Pittsblog Rings In Year Five: A Cupcake Future for the Burgh

Tomorrow marks the beginning of Pittsblog's fifth year, and as Pittsburghers have always said, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

But there is hope. 2007 was Pittsburgh's Year of the Cupcake. It was about this time a year ago that Dozen Cupcakes and Coco's both opened their doors. With help and encouragement from an assortment of winking and nodding up-to-no-goodniks, I christened their proprietors and customers "the Cupcake Class," the tier of Pittsburghers who, through their wealth and fashion and food sensibilities, supposedly hold the keys to the city's future prosperity. Search this blog's archives for "cupcake" for the proverbial taste of the argument. Steel? Bah. As the cupcake goes, so goes Pittsburgh. Ha.

In the cupcake world as elsewhere, what goes around comes around. One year on, word comes that local cupcake business is booming. Dozen is expanding to Lawrenceville, and CoCo's is on the cusp of opening an Oakland location. Is life imitating art? Is the Cupcake Class a real phenomenon after all?

Time will tell. Happy New Year!

(H/T to Chris at Rusty Bridge)

They're B-a-a-a-a-ck

Remember last Spring's interminable Pittsblog angst over the emergent Cupcake Class? Of course you do. (If for some reason that series of posts has been purged from your memory, here's a link to the Post-Gazette piece that capped the whole thing.)

Today, no less an authority than The New York Times anointed cupcakes as a national wedge issue. Should cupcakes be banned from schools? On the one hand:

"While the merits of banning goodie bags filled with Reese’s and Skittles seem obvious — especially at a time when the risk of childhood diabetes is high for American children — many parents draw the line at cupcakes.

This could have something to do with the fact that in the modern age, the cupcake may be more American than apple pie — “because nobody is baking apple pies,” Professor Nestle explained.

The confection is so powerfully embedded in the national consciousness — and palate — that its future is quite possibly the only cause to unite Texas Republicans and at least some left-wing foodies behind a singular mission: keep the cupcake safe from harm."

and on the other hand:

"Can the cupcake loyalist support the sale of a chocolate Guinness cupcake with green-tea cream-cheese frosting? Has the cupcake been stolen from the people by the baking aristocracy?

For a sense of how charged the subject is, consider what happened in July, when Magnolia Bakery, having vaulted to fad status by an appearance on “Sex and the City,” was briefly shut down by the city health department for not having enough sinks at its Greenwich Village establishment.

“At last!” said a blogger posting on Eater.com. “We neighbors get relief from cupcakistas who don’t realize Duncan Hines makes better-tasting cupcakes.”

After a long debate thread, another blogger wrote, “You people need to go back to the suburbs ... Seriously, bunch of grown up New York City residents obsessing over a cupcake shop. I miss the gunfire and crackheads.”

Cupcakistas? That's a fighting word. Aux armes, members of the Cupcake Class! Your access to frivolous, overpriced, American-as-apple-pie, comfort food confections is in jeopardy!

Bookends

Without intending to, I pulled off an unusual double in today's Post-Gazette: I have a byline on the first page -- and on The Next Page -- of the paper's Forum section.

On the front: The Birth of Penguins Nation (with Chad Hermann, a/k/a Teacher. Wordsmith. Madman.). In his 4/1 post today, Chad describes how this piece came about. It's a nice little story in itself -- old media; new media; virtual collaboration; civil and civic discourse and public fellowship. Chad and I each have a new colleague, and we both had a bit of fun. Thanks to Greg Victor at the P-G running the essay. And for anyone who hasn't figured this out: Chad is the hockey fan. I'm the one who hasn't been to an NHL game in 30 years.

On The Next Page: The Cupcake Class and its Contentment. More fun at the expense of, and on behalf of, the region's cupcake creators and consumers. On the same page, Chris Briem offers typically insightful cupcake econometrics; he elaborates (and rightly blames/credits me with the phrase "Cupcake Class" as a derivative of "the Custard Class") in his post today. Our third collaborator, leavening the academic tone of the whole affair, is Rachel Kramer Bussel, who blogs at Cupcakes Take the Cake and who writes on a variety of, um, other topics. Her contribution lends a new dimension to the Cupcake Class, perhaps even to Pittsburgh's future as a whole. In the spirit of Rachel's principal line of work, I'll let you fill in the details on your own. Thanks to John Allison (who edited the page and coined the witty, J.K. Galbraith-ian headline) and Stacy Innerst (for the illustrations). Happy April Fool's Day.

The Fuss About Cupcakes

I'm gradually being seduced by the idea of the cupcake class, simply because the cupcake-obsessed take nice photos.

A member of the world-beating Cupcakes Take the Cake team was in Pittsburgh recently, and collected cupcake specimens from their habitats in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. A review is promised; for now, here are links to the photos:

Dozen

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

CoCo's

The Cupcake Class is Coming for You

Cupcakes are on the march, and those who doubt that cupcake destiny is manifest will get an earful. From Cupcakes Take the Cake: "Just Say No to the Cupcake Haters."

Cupcakes are democratic. For everyone that invokes Sex and the City, I actually think they're not about being showy or glamorous, but down home and simple (with some exceptions, of course). They are not about east coast or west coast or big city vs. small. Cupcake bakeries are spreading all across the country and into the rest of the world and you can almost hear the clamoring for them. So you'd better get used to it!

If Stephen Colbert can get his own flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, as he has, then surely he will soon have his own cupcake. It's all too easy to imagine SC saying, "If you hate cupcakes, then you hate America."

In other cupcake news, a reader pointed out to me that revisionists at the Tribune-Review have corrected the record, attributing the word "jokingly" retroactively to my cupcake posts in the online version of a story about Pittsburgh's cupcakeries that prompted my post entitled The Truthiness About the Cupcake Class.

Prediction Markets Pittsburgh

Chris Briem wants to use prediction markets to guide Pittsburgh's renewal, and I think that it's a great idea. Chris is starting off with contracts (registered participants "buy" and "sell" these contracts, which determines a predicted market "value"; the thicker the market -- the more people participating -- the better the prediction):

When will a casino open in Pittsburgh?

Will the Penguins announce relocation on or before April 1st, 2007

(this one seems to be a non-starter, so I'm not including the link!)

The markets are online at http://home.inklingmarkets.com/, but we need more contracts. How about:

Who will be the next Mayor of Pittsburgh?

What will be Pittsburgh's next breakout technology company?

When will the Steelers get back to the Super Bowl?

When will Allegheny County's Latino population reach 2% of the total?

Will Pittsburgh's Creative Class ever get the recognition and respect that it deserves?

and, of course,

Which store -- CoCo's or Dozen -- will win the local cupcake wars?

New Businesses

Entrepreneurial notes from all over . . . companies out-competing themselves:

Talkshoe, which I blogged about last Fall, seems to be humming along with its "talkcast" technology, but it turns out that the firm has something of a competitor -- locally: Liberated Syndication, which recently got rolled up into Wizzard Media, part of Wizzard Software, to create what it calls "the largest podcasting distribution network in the world." "Sharecropping" is what Nick Carr calls the user-generated content production business model. It's lucrative, and simultaneously old and new; podcasting distribution means your customers and consumers are out there competing on your behalf. Eventually, however, the sharecroppers will go into business for themselves.

The intelligent avatar technology called "Abby" got a nice plug in last Saturday's Bits & Bytes as Abbyme.com, which allows users to program the avatar to send audio files on their behalf, was getting prepped for a business plan competition. Note to team, based on a quick check of the files that users are sending: watch for the copyright cops. All those clever movie clips that Abby is sending -- they belong to someone.

Abby has other applications and a much more polished appearance, via http://www.getabby.com/, the intelligent virtual assistant firm that used to be known as Eidoserve. (Earlier notes on eidoserve here (Post-Gazette) and here (Pittsblog).) Abby is more traditional entrepreneurship: nifty technology looking to fill every niche it can find. I don't know about the business prospects for using Abby to send movie clips to your friends (then again, ringtones are just about the world's biggest music market; who knew?). But CMU, which spun out the underlying technology, is making money here.

And I spent some time last Friday visiting Ellsworth Street's CoCo's Cupcake Cafe courtesy of an invitation from co-owner and self-proclaimed cupcake chick Shea Mullen, who took note of my earlier posts on the Cupcake Class. CoCo's, like Squirrel Hill cupcake competitor Dozen Cupcakes, is about two months into streetside retailing. If traffic on a late Friday afternoon is any guide, the walk-in trade is doing fine. Better money, though, at least for now, likely comes from call-in orders and catering. Can Pittsburgh support two cupcakeries? Better two than one, perhaps (echoing the old line about how a small town can't support one lawyer, but it can support two). But chic itself won't carry a cupcake store, even one like CoCo's that has space to host private parties and receive soon-to-move-to-Pittsburgh hipsters looking for a future oasis. Shea was a generous host and an excellent in-person ad for the business, and I bought a bunch of cupcakes to take home to the family. She has no plans, she said, to sell cupcakes anywhere except through the store, so that she isn't tempted to compromise on quality. My inner foodie likes the line; my inner-amateur-entrepreneur wonders how long that will last. I saw cupcakes in Starbuck's last week.

With cupcake saturation, how long will people be willing to shell out $2.50 per cupcake -- anywhere? The cupcake market presents Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma: Should you specialize, maintain your margins, and move upmarket? Low cost competitors will move in like sharks. Or should you give up those fat margins, maintain your market share, and commodify? You don't get rich, and you don't get new, but you stay in business. (Christensen's third way is to innovate outside the box -- challenge your own business model.) Right now, and reading the leading cupcake blog, the industry is betting on option one: fancier and purer cupcakes. Home bakers aren't hurting that business. But low-cost upscale cupcakes eventually will. When high end cupcakes come to Costco and Sam's Club, watch out -- or watch for branded cupcakes in a restaurant or coffee house near you.