Dartblog

On Sunday I was taken to Sprinkles, an advanced cupcake outlet in the Stanford Shopping Center. I think the cupcake I purchased was four dollars. Subtleties within the store indicated that this was a pretty good deal. The dog cupcakes, for example, were one-twelfth the size of the human cupcakes, yet for them one-half the price was asked: two dollars. We spent ten minutes in the store and no one, thank God, bought a dog cupcake. It was notable the size of the doggie cupcakes. In my experience with the canine race, they prefer that their food come at a diameter roughly equal to the spread of their mouth. Dogs were not the creatures for which the “bite-sized” category of food was created. But if you’d seen the animals outside Sprinkles you’d have understood that the two dollar dime-sized cupcake was invented for the precocious dog, the sort of smart tennis-playing dog who at only one year old and twelve inches long is already into cardigans and bows.

Something should be said about the craft behind the interior design of the store. It is not small; it is a standard retail rectangle; but it is designed in the least efficient way, as though some wily one went into a New York bagel shop, took down notes, and then sequestered himself in the task of reversing the service efficiencies evolved over the last couple of centuries. One is forced to enter Sprinkles at one end of the rectangle, order a cupcake, and then pace to the other end where an effeminate man will run your American Express. Then you must walk all the way back to the other end and out the door. But there are only several feet separating the principal elevation and the ordering counter, on account of the cupcake display. The effect is that a queue of people is produced outside the door of Sprinkles, between red velvet ropes, even when only four or five people are interested in buying cupcakes.

The funhouse interior coupled with the slothfulness of the clerks, whom I suspect are paid by how few people they can serve in the course of an hour, produces a line without fail. And the line, the thinking goes, attracts the weaker-minded customers—these are also, coincidentally, those who are likely to own tiny dogs.