Fall has arrived around here, even if Mother Nature is reluctant to usher in a new season. Our temperatures will be summerlike for another day or two. Regardless, “autumn” always brings baking to the forefront of my to-do list. I’ve already cranked out a breakfast pizza (three cheeses!), I’m sure to serve up a pumpkin pie before Halloween, and just this morning I whipped up three dozen gingerbread cookies. But whenever I bake cookies I always find myself thinking, “Should I have just gone to Crumbl instead?”
You know Crumbl, or some other cookie chain just like it. For ten years running Crumbl has tempted impulse buyers with their overly-large, overly-sweet, overly-everything baked goods. Crumbl cookies are so big they’ll sell you a small device much like a pizza cutter so you can share a cookie with friends. But let’s be real – if you’re spending as much on a Crumbl cookie as you would a Starbucks latte are you really gonna share? No, you’ll probably down the entire cookie within thirty minutes of purchase, your only regret arriving somewhere during digestion.
Now for something even harder to digest. Crumbl is on its way out. The clock is close to striking midnight on a company that somehow convinced us that five dollars was a reasonable price for a cookie. Despite the headlines I don’t think Crumbl’s demise is a symptom of the cost of living as much as it is all of us finally emerging from our sugar comas and declaring, “Enough is enough”.
It took me awhile to give Crumbl a try. When we lived in Colorado they opened a store right next to one of our favorite restaurants. For a long time we wondered what the fuss was all about. Then one day we skipped the dessert menu and decided to give the cookies a try instead. We bought four (for a mere twenty dollars). If I’m being honest? They were just okay. Some choices worked (frosted sugar cookie with raspberry jam – yum!) while others didn’t measure up (standard chocolate chip – boring!).
Honestly what I remember most about Crumbl was not the cookies but rather the wait in line to order. While I did, I watched the nearby people waiting at the pick-up counter. It didn’t take long to realize most of them were DoorDash drivers, delivering cookies to the college dorms not even a ten-minute walk from the store. So not only are those students paying big for big cookies, they’re paying to have them delivered, when they could’ve walked off a few of the calories. Can I get a What’s wrong with this country?
Our daughter embraced the Crumbl craze when she got married in 2022. She ordered two hundred of their “minis”, wrapped them up individually in elegant little boxes, and placed them next to the dinner plate of each guest at the reception. When the party was over we discovered at least half of the cookies left behind. Perhaps the beginning of Crumbl’s end actually started years ago.
Side note: If you place an order through Crumbl’s website the first decision you’ll have to make is whether to “reject non-essential” or “accept all” cookies. Isn’t that great? 🙂
Just this week Crumbl announced the closure of 75 of its stores and significant layoffs at its Utah headquarters. The critics are blaming the cutbacks on the failed promotion of “dirty sodas”, another Utah-based product (popular with Mormons and their non-alcoholic ways). I don’t “buy” this theory. I just think we’ve reached our tolerance for high-priced cookies, and have moved on to the next comfort-food indulgence trend (like the gelato I wrote about several weeks ago.
The Crumbl store we have here in our small town opened just over a year ago, in the same shopping center as a popular supermarket. People go in an out of the supermarket by the dozens but I have yet to see any of them wander down the sidewalk to Crumbl. It’s a sad sight when you drive by the storefront: the lone cashier standing behind the counter waiting for anyone to buy a big cookie. Even sadder, it won’t be long before her manager asks her to go out into the lobby and lock the front door – for good.
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LEGO Neuschwanstein Castle – Update #10 (read about the start of this project in Fit for a (Fairy Tale) King
The castle is complete at last, even if the surrounding landscape is not. Bags 19 and 20 (of 23 bags of pieces) focused almost entirely on the completion of the west-facing palas (residential building). Not only was this structure much taller than I expected, but it’s topped by an intricate roof that consumed a good portion of Bag 20. Dozens of pieces went into the black topping of the building you see below.
I also felt like I was building a couple of rocket ships today. Neuschwanstein’s tall, dramatic stair towers start out as long plastic LEGO dowels, on which you spin circular piece after circular piece. Finally you set the whole assembly upright and snap it into the surrounding castle. Two of Neuschwanstein’s stair towers are located intentionally where the terrain of the ridge below takes a bit of a turn.
Sometimes LEGO pieces have a hard time mimicking the small details of a structure. The western palas claims to have “a copper lion atop the court-side gable, while a knight’s likeness is on the outward facing gable, offering a protective touch to the castle.” The knight is up there on the rooftop all right, but I didn’t find a “copper lion” anywhere in the bags (let alone in my pile of leftovers).
The very last step in today’s build was to add thirty-two tree trunks to the landscape. That’s a lot of wood. You have to zoom in on the photo to see these tiny brown poles but tune in next week because, in a flourish of a finish, we’ll use the final three bags of pieces to top them off with bursts of color.
Running build time: 10:55
Total leftover pieces: 65 (including 2 tree trunks!)
Accompanying movie soundtrack: Pride & Prejudice (2005). Today’s choice was something of an experiment. Pride & Prejudice shows up regularly on “elegant soundtrack” lists but I’ve never seen the movie (let alone read anything by Jane Austen). So I figured, maybe the music will have me wanting to watch the film. The soundtrack includes several piano solos, probably tied to slow, dramatic scenes. You also get a few instances of lively fiddle-playing, probably connected to scenes with dancing. But for the most part the soundtrack had me imagining moments where the camera zooms in on a character’s face, and their expression says it all. Will I watch Pride & Prejudice? I just might. After all, any movie that zooms in on Kiera Knightley is worth the watch.
Some content sourced from the bonappétit.com article, “The End of Cookie Chains”, and the ksl.com article, “Utah-based Crumbl closes dozens of locations…”.
It’s sad when businesses fail, but overpriced junk food. Eh, was that really good for anyone? Also, I’d never heard of Crumbl. Apparently they didn’t make it out my way.
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