| Sugary treat serves as a personality test (3/08) | | Print | |
| Written by Sandra Chen | |
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“This is our most popular cupcake. It has a moist chocolate cake topped with a rich, creamy, mousse-like chocolate butter cream rolled in chocolate shavings…” and so goes the script for greeting customers. The script continues to describe all fourteen flavors of our “signature cupcakes.” In my six months of working and reciting at Kara’s Cupcakes, I’ve found that the wide variety of gourmet cupcake flavors mirror the wide array of customers that file in every day.
I like to classify the people who come into the store by using cupcakes. You have your general vanilla and chocolate customers — they simply order their cupcakes and leave. There are the fruity ones who can provide interesting and sweet conversations. And then there are the specialty cupcake-lovers who are a hit-or-miss. I’ve seen frantic wives-to-be flee to the store in tears searching for the perfect wedding cake to match their dress, and procrastinating boyfriends who after forgetting their girlfriend’s birthdays struggle to choose between raspberry butter cream or lemon — while their significant other waits for them at a restaurant around the corner. I learned the hard way that the saying, “you are what you eat” is riddled with lies. As cute and as pretty as the cupcakes are, people who consume them in two bites certainly aren’t. I love kids, but after this job I’ve begun to have my doubts about them. Not all children who enter the store are sugar-high monsters, but a select few get on my nerves and cause a couple more white hairs to grow. Take the young boy who came in with his father, admiring the store’s pink embellishment. He runs up to the glass case, which I had just sprayed and cleaned off. Smack! His hands, sticky with remnants of jelly, glue themselves to the glass. He wails to his father, demanding the chocolate frosted cupcake. And in a Matrix-like moment, his tongue slowly runs down the length of the case, squeaking as it goes, leaving a tell-tale trail of drool. I’ve also seen a young boy’s mother buy six cupcakes to make up for one that he dropped barely two seconds after the purchase. He proceeded to eat them all in one sitting. Yet some moments retain their sweetness, like striking up scintillating conversations with strangers over the underground esoteric wonders of cupcakes. One customer kept a travel blog of cupcake shops. He and his wife comb through the nation as cupcake connoisseurs, searching for cupcake stores and tasting their specialty wares. They weren’t your typical critics with high-perched glasses and sharp eyes. Instead they looked like someone’s grandparents. We exchanged notes on cupcakes — the perfect frosting, size and methods for eating cupcakes. Weekends are the busiest days to work. People mill around, taking their sweet time before work calls them back. There are always four large cupcake rushes: after breakfast at 11a.m., after lunch around 2 p.m., last minute desserts for dinner around 5 p.m., and late at night when the night-crawlers come seeking sweet treats. Customers either file out the door or crowd around the display case. Children scream out flavors, fathers coerce mothers to get a chocolate one for their toddler and aunts and uncles fight over who’s paying for cupcakes. As we try to serve the sometimes frantic customers a few who will gripe and groan, whether it’s over the last cupcake of a certain flavor or our inability to service every customer quickly. It’s difficult, as any job is when dealing with customers. Working at Kara’s Cupcakes exposes me to the different types of people in our very own city. I am becoming increasingly accurate with my customer classifications. Not everyone is a plain chocolate or vanilla cupcake. Some people are a little bitter, others a bit too sweet. Who knows? Maybe one day a customer will march through the doors and I won’t have a cupcake flavor to compare them to. But when that day comes, it’ll be quite the adventure. If there’s anything I have learned at Kara’s Cupcakes, it’s that we’re all cupcakes inside. |
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to listen.
