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Would you wait 2 hours for this?
Turns out lots of people will. Meet the hired
hands who’ll wait on line — for an exorbitant fee — so that lazy New
Yorkers can get the latest sugar fix
Last Friday at 8 a.m., a line of 20- and 30-somethings stretched down an entire block of Spring Street.
Armed with folding chairs, board games and iPads, they might have been queuing for summer’s hottest concert ticket.
Instead, the hungry hordes were waiting for a bakery to open.
Last
month, Dominique Ansel Bakery introduced a new pastry dubbed the cronut
that has sparked hysteria reminiscent of Beatlemania.
Half-croissant,
half-doughnut and wholly artery-clogging, the $5 creme-filled
confection melds sweet and tart flavors. There’s only one version
available at any time, and flavors change monthly. Available now is a
lemon-maple glazed edition.
Astrid Stawiarz/NY Post
Jeni Mistretta paid a line-sitter $25 to get her a cronut.
Speculation about new flavors runs high, as does the black-market pricing.
The
bakery produces only 250 cronuts a day — and there’s a limit of two per
person. They go on sale at 8 each morning, but a line begins to form at
6. Once the doors open, groups of 20 people are herded inside the shop.
The phenomenon has many New Yorkers desperate to get their paws on the pastry by any means.
That’s
opened the door to industrious entrepreneurs who see plenty of dough to
be made, camping out at the bakery hours in advance and then charging
up to $50 per cronut (a 900 percent markup).
“If they’re willing,
we’re able,” says Tawny, a 27-year-old data analyst who was recently
laid off and declined to give her last name for fear of losing her new
lucrative gig as a cronut line-waiter.
She and her friend Janet, a
grad student at UC Berkeley in town for the summer, each charge $70 for
two cronuts. (There’s an additional $10 surcharge for deliveries
outside of Manhattan.)
Their new gig entails a 5:45 a.m. wake-up
time, a 20-minute subway commute costing $5 round-trip, a 90-minute wait
for the goods and, of course, the schlep to the client’s meeting place
of choice, occasionally in far-flung locations.
And then, of course, there’s the unpredictable weather.
“The
rain today sucked,” confesses Tawny, who jumped on the cronut bandwagon
after hearing about line-sitters monetizing the flaky treat.
“The money is nice, obviously, but it’s definitely a lot of effort,” she notes.
“We made 80 bucks today — that’s about $12 an hour,” she says.
Then her friend Janet corrects her: “Um, that’s $6 each.”
But with a daunting $1,200 rent to pay for her Gramercy Park pad, any extra cash helps.
“I
was doing high-level analytics before this,” says Tawny. “Yes, we’re
making money, but it really only pays for a meal or two. We’ll continue
doing this while the craze continues, but we’re not making a career out
of it.”
Having been hired via Craigslist, she rarely meets clients face-to-face; most buyers send their interns for the trade-off.
So just who are these line-averse New Yorkers who want a piece of the action without actually having to wait patiently for it?
Jeni Mistretta is a 30-year-old production manager who got swept up in the hoopla, but had the dime and not the time.
“Eff waking up at 5 a.m. to get on a line,” sniffs Mistretta.
“It’s way easier for someone else to do that,” she says of the steep outsourcing.
After
haggling with one line-sitter over the cost — one entrepreneur demanded
$50 per treat — she found someone reliable and cheaper to deliver the
goods, after a week of negotiations. “It was a wild ride to get to my
cronut; people thought I was nuts,” she says.
She finally settled on a line-waiter who charged $25 for a single cronut.
Mistretta proudly showed off her 3-ounce loot at her office last week.
“When
I finally got it, it was as if I delivered a child, and everyone was
visiting my desk just to see it; people came around all day, fascinated
about how it tasted.
“It was a conversation piece all day — everyone’s still talking about the cronut.”
But after spending an eye-popping $25 for the sweet treat, the considerable expense didn’t sit so well.
“I ended up eating half of it,” she admits. “And I sold two quarters for $5 each.”
