Blowing the Icing Off Late Capitalism Cupcakes

Why I'm saying buh bye to a beloved Los Angeles ritual

Sweet Lady Jane’s three berry cake was a ritual treat I’d enjoyed for years, often with my friend Mavis, who was meeting me at the Montana Ave bakery café on a recent Saturday for a coffee and cake catch up. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks—not only sharing life stories and laughs with Mavis, but also because I’ve stopped indulging in my once significant sugar intake for health reasons. Sweet Lady Jane’s strawberry, blueberry and raspberry with whip cream and yellow cake confection is practically a health food, chock full of fresh fruit goodness and not excessively sweet. Knowing it’s waiting for me at the end of a sugarless road helps me hold off on other temptations.

But this day, when I opened the slickly redesigned box shaped like a cake slice, I was shocked to see the broken up, piddling-sized piece that had just cost me $10. At checkout, the price struck me as higher than before, and even at that, I still added a 15% tip for the young clerk doing the slicing. So that brought the tab just for cake to $11.50. Post Covid and in light of recent inflation, it seemed everyone was raising prices. I didn’t say a word.

Staring into the abyss of the cake box, I was shocked to see they’d also reduced the portion size. What had once been a healthy slab of cake, enough to share or take home for a second serving, was now half what it once was, barely a single sitting’s worth of satisfaction. Plus the edge of this slice was chewed up, crumbled and frayed, like the way I felt in that moment, as if the clerk, despite her pleasant repartee, really didn’t care.

I was livid. 

I showed Mavis the slovenly, shrunken slice. “I know,” she said, “they’re charging more and cutting from smaller cakes, the 7 inch instead of the 9 inch, so the slices are a lot smaller.” She’d heard complaints from other friends. She was on a sugar fast and was going cake-less today, bringing strawberries to go with her tea.

I went inside to confirm her story. “Yes,” the young woman who’d served me said, “that’s what they’re doing and we can’t do anything about it.”  I got the sense she’d roughed up my slice so I’d complain to the proper authorities. When I asked her who to complain to, she gave me a card with an e-mail address. I went back outside, ate my puny piece of over-priced cake and drank my pricey cup of coffee.

My husband had asked me to bring back a cupcake if any were to be had. There were and in ample supply—cupcakes suddenly appeared to be their thing. The price?  $5.50. Pretty steep for a cupcake, especially these, which looked particularly small. It was Montana Ave after all, where a tariff on posh is to be expected. And at those prices, who wouldn’t make cupcakes their thing?

For decades, I’d kept a cupcake price index in my head, a comforting economic talisman to reference in tough times. If the economy ever went kablooey, I told myself, I could always bake and sell cupcakes. I had a great recipe from an early ‘90s Gourmet magazine, when bakery cupcakes were still under $2.00.

I purchased exactly one pink lemonade flavored cupcake for the love of my life. We were, after all, retirees on a fixed income. What was Jane, this allegedly sweet lady, doing fucking with our cakes and cupcakes? Would we one day have to choose between her bakery treats and our medication?

Sitting at SLJ’s (I can no longer afford to use the full name, only the acronym) outdoor table beneath the spiffy new black and white striped umbrellas, I opened the small, square, adorable or pretentious (depending on your POV) single cupcake box, only to be shocked for the second time that day. Never had I seen such a small cupcake, not at that price. It was a sullen stepchild’s birthday cupcake, calling for a miniature fork with which to pick at it, its perfectly ruffled pink icing cap topping an insulting few bites of cake. In the box it looked smaller than it did in the shop’s display case. Did the new case with the plastic shield separating customers from counter crew actually magnify their offerings? I closed the teensy cupcake box, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.

Back home, my husband shared my dismay, especially when the pink lemonade cupcake was actually lacking in the taste of lemon. My outrage turned to action, I started scraping back the icing on SLJ. The SLJ cupcake weighed 2.5 ounces. A Sprinkles’ cupcake (we always keep a few in the freezer, don’t tell Sprinkles, which insists they should be eaten the same day) weighed 4 ounces! I called Susie Cakes in Brentwood, another old cupcake haunt of mine, they told me their cupcake weighed 3.77 ounces. On the price front, Sprinkles acknowledged they had recently raised their baseline rates to $5 a cupcake, while Suzie Cakes was $4.75. I number crunched: Sprinkles cost $1.25 an ounce, Suzie Cakes $1.26 an ounce and SLJ is an outrageous (in my estimation) $2.20 an ounce.

         I further Googled my way into SLJ’s recent history. I discovered it was more than just a shift in management, as the counter help seemed to allude, but a brand consulting firm, Cohere, that had swooped in to upscale their image. Cohere’s slogan? “Make shit happen,” (I kid you not). The agency boasts Jackass Burrito as a client, along with SLJ. So rude, so crude—kids today! Go, visit their website and glory in all the latest marketing jargon they shovel onto the pile of shit they’ve made happen. And please tell me if you can find anywhere they make mention of customer satisfaction. I couldn’t find where pleasing customers, or maintaining customer loyalty, as opposed to just deluding consumers into paying too much for too little, was on their table.

I’m not going to blame Cohere entirely for wrecking my beloved SLJ three berry cake ritual and sending my cupcake price index through the roof. Maybe SLJ raised prices and lowered expectations to pay for Cohere’s branding magic. Maybe it was Cohere who convinced them to do the black and white striped awning and umbrella upgrades, never telling them what those would cost, and to rearrange the store interior, replacing cozy tables for sitting with a single display of luxe party accessories for people with more money than sense.

What I am going to blame is the increasingly ugly economic landscape many such as myself enjoy referring to as Late Capitalism. Even if we’re not entirely sure what that means. My personal definition now includes SLJ’s teensy cupcakes and miserly cake slices for an excessive price. And doing so in a city, like far too many cities in California, suffering a homeless crisis. That too has been heavily researched and well-reported on as a product of Late Capitalism. When housing prices keep rising, more people end up on the street, not always because it’s their fault, but because banks and realtors rule the day. It’s the shrinking middle class disappearing as the haves and have not populations grow.

So, no, SLJ, I won’t be buying anymore of your puny over-priced offerings. I’ll find another more reasonable cake to love and I’ll drive into Beverly Hills for Sprinkles, as long as they’ll have me—because they are worth it!