This really takes the cake

I went to church this weekend and left really ticked off—and for once it did not have anything to do with a second collection, crying baby or the length of the homily. Actually what got me angry occurred after mass when I saw the signs urging parishioners to go to the PTA Bake Sale in the adjacent school cafeteria/church hall. (Lesson here: arrive five minutes late and you miss the important “bake sale after all masses this weekend” announcement.) Immediately visions of reasonably priced homemade bundt cakes, pies, brownies and cupcakes popped into my head. I remember my mother taking two hours to bake strawberry walnut squares from scratch, shelling walnuts (who could afford the pre-shelled in those days?), creaming the butter, folding in the flour, sugar and nuts and then struggling to get the thing out of the pan without cracking it. And in those days no one even dared to use a boxed cake mix, let alone a can of frosting. So you can imagine the chagrin I felt when I walked through the doors and saw that at least 75% of the items were store-bought and a good 90% of those were from the A&P! WTF? (Where’s the fondant?) As those trendy Millennials like to Tweet. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if these items were at least disguised as being homemade, but they were clearly from the A&P. I know this because they were still in the store packaging! On one bundt pudding cake the organizers simply peeled off the price on the Two Forks Bakery price tag/ingredient statement, left the rest of the label intact and put a $10.00 price tag on top! At least the new price sticker was handmade. The next day when I was shopping in the A&P I saw a table of siblings to that exact bundt cake for $2.99! Either A&P is way undercharging what the market will bear for their baked goods or if this bake sale was being conducted in the aftermath of a hurricane this church would be shut down for price gouging! Likewise, the pumpkin pies ($10.00 bake sale/$3.99 retail) were in clear clamshells with a “Pumpkin” sticker on top, and the crumb coffee cakes were in perfectly crimped aluminum trays. When I do the store tours for my Retail Spotlight features operator after operator—even those in the Deep South—inform me that they have shrunk their baking mixes aisle because fewer and fewer people bake these days. Sadly, my visit to the church bake sale showed me that this is indeed true. I realize everyone is hard-pressed for time these days, but the whole purpose of a school bake sale is that the parent is supposed to sacrifice and make something from scratch to donate to raise funds. Somehow, buying a $2.99 bundt cake and jacking the price up to 10 bucks just isn’t the same thing. Then it dawned on me. Maybe A&P and the rest of the industry are missing a marketing opportunity here. Perhaps retailers should establish a separate division that runs school and church bake sales. They could bring the cakes in at cost and sell it at a reasonable mark-up with all proceeds going to the school. Maybe even bring in that big red coffee grinder and sell bags of Eight O’Clock coffee or sandwiches and fried chicken from the deli department too. That would go well after the 12:00 noon mass. As for myself, I couldn’t bring myself to shell out $10.00 for a store-bought cake that I knew was worth $3.00. Even though it was for charity I felt like I was getting snookered. I did spy a platter filled with 10 of these little Portuguese cream pastry tarts that I like. A customer asked one of the PTA moms how much they were. She said they were $1.00 each. I know at A. Seabra’s, the Portuguese supermarket from where they probably came from, they go for $1.25 each, so that what as good bargain and I thought I’d buy a few of them to help out the school. Unfortunately, he ended up buying five of them. Then the good Christian lady who cut in front of me bought the final five so I ended up out of luck. I did manage to buy a bag of three chocolate chip cookies for $1.00. They certainly looked and tasted homemade, with rich butter dough and real chocolate chips. However, the attractive cellophane bags with snowflakes on them, tied with a red ribbon, raised my suspicions. Something packaged that beautifully must have been from the A&P.