[Originally posted to LinkedIn on December 16, 2025 and reposted here for archival purposes.]
Certain corners of Pittsburgh jumped for joy, proverbially speaking, reacting to news that Phat Bagel has opened a storefront in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood. Huzzah! “Baked Phresh. Served Phat.” Clever. I made a note myself: add Phat Bagel to my itinerary the next time I am in that neighborhood.
But the jumping seemed to have to do with more than the fact that Pittsburgh has another source of good, fresh bagels. Hard working entrepreneurs! Thriving neighborhood business district! Positive flywheel! More, please.
And I thought to myself: we’ve seen this story before, Pittsburgh has. This is the Cupcake Class redux.
Before I go on:
To be clear, I will buy and eat these bagels, and I really hope that they are as good as promised in the PR hype. I don’t need the merch, but I hope that lots of it moves out the door and the website. I hope that the store stays and thrives and that all of the proprietors and employees and customers and neighbors have whatever long and prosperous experiences that they desire, and that more of the same and similar comes through whatever pipeline produced this business. Really.
But to me, this is much more a story of market demand than market supply, and it is more a story of normalcy rather than a tale of the extraordinary. This is neighborhood capitalism, which is something that Pittsburgh wants and needs, over and over again, and that I am happy to say is in much greater supply than it was, say, 20 years ago. Neighborhood capitalism has a subspecies that is in some respects part of the Phat Bagel experience, which is food tourism. I don’t live in or near Bloomfield, so I’m not a neighborhood backer or buyer. If I go to Bloomfield to seek out a specific food vendor, I’m a food tourist. We’ve seen food tourism in Pittsburgh before, and while food tourism won’t save a town or a neighborhood, it’s an adventure that I appreciate.
Again: I re-introduce the Cupcake Class.
The Cupcake Class is a bit of primitive economic semi-silliness that I foisted on the Pittsburgh media scene not quite 20 years ago, abetted by a good friend behind the scenes and by partners at the Post-Gazette and the Tribune-Review. The serious story was and is this:
Once upon a time, and building on the success of Magnolia Bakery in New York (celebrated in the original “Sex in the City” TV show), a couple of high-end cupcake bakeries appeared in Pittsburgh’s East End. There was Dozen, and there was CoCo. In a city that seemed to take pride in home-baked cupcakes from mixes and cheap cupcakes from grocery stores and little local bakeries, $4 and $5 cupcakes seemed – to me, amateur Pittsburgh sociologist that I was – a bit much.
What was going on? I had recently had the experience of being talked down to by the women staffing my own little local bakery, who informed me that “custard” (as in “custard-filled donuts”) came only in one flavor. Custard. When I asked, “what flavor is the custard?,” I learned that I was bringing a certain snobbery to the counter. Thus was born, via my bloggish wit, “the Custard Class,” an homage to Richard Florida’s “Creative Class,” of which I was already a member.
“Creative Class,” you ask? Remember that not long before my unfortunate bakery encounter, Richard Florida – then a professor at Carnegie Mellon University – published a celebrated book titled “The Rise of the Creative Class … and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life.” Florida, a sociologist by training, examined the changing patterns of late 20th century urban life and prescribed public policies aimed at attracting and reinforcing communities of “creatives,” a broad category of people, mostly young, who would bring life, dynamism, and above all money to places. Want to renew Pittsburgh, for example? Make Pittsburgh friendly to “the Creative Class.”
I made a quirky imaginative leap from the Creative Class to the Custard Class, then, and once Dozen and CoCo opened their doors, to the Cupcake Class.
I wrote a series of blog posts about the Cupcake Class, some more serious than others. Not everyone understood or cared about the lineage of the phrase. Some readers laughed or smiled. Some took offense.
At the risk of re-offending but in the interest of contemporary clarity, the following was, and remains, the serious core of the Cupcake Class meme:
A business that can keep its doors open selling $4 and $5 cupcakes has found an addressable market, meaning a population of people willing to spend that much money on baked delicacies, for one reason or another. To borrow the legendary quotation from “Arrested Development,” there is always money in the banana stand. In Pittsburgh, there was money in the East End. There has long been money in the East End, but that money has not always been directed to overpriced pastries.
But (the meme continues) retailing cupcakes is a business with low barriers to entry. Margins may be small, but profit is profit. If there really was money to be made selling fancy cupcakes, or if there appears to be, then other fancy cupcake entrepreneurs will appear. That’s capitalism 101: competition is the way. And in Pittsburgh, competition did follow. Dozen had CoCo; CoCo had Dozen. Not to mention the legacy little neighborhood bakeries, and bakeries in grocery stores, and Duncan Hines.
And (the meme concludes) if Pittsburgh – full stop – imagines bigger or better or wealthier or more equitable or all of those things and more, then competition brings risk, and loss, as well as growth and opportunity. Competition is stressful. Competition is uncomfortable. Especially for the competitors. Often for incumbents. Success is never secure; the founders and the community may celebrate the launch but not think too hard, soon enough about how to keep the doors open six months or a year down the line. Long-established businesses may get disrupted. Maybe a first-mover advantage would keep the high-end cupcakeries, or one of them, in business. Maybe community and family legacy would protect the little neighborhood bakeries from novelty higher-end bakers. Maybe there would be enough money in the East End to sustain more than one cupcakery. Or maybe the demand for high-end cupcakes would turn out to be a fad, and the cupcake craze would fade away. Cupcakes come and cupcakes go, as they say. The Cupcake Class would remain, but they would spend their money elsewhere.
And that last piece is largely what happened. Most entrepreneurial ventures fail. Dozen and CoCo are long gone.
(A quick note to acknowledge that while I never met the proprietors of either store, I did buy and try their cupcakes – they were delicious – and I know that baking and selling cupcakes was not the be-all-and-end-all of their businesses. I’m telling a parable here, not creating a case for an MBA course.)
Closing the stores was and is too bad for those who founded, worked at, and loved Dozen, CoCo, and other high-end cupcake ventures.
But this is normalcy. That’s the point. The rise of incomes in the East End that gave rise to the Cupcake Class? Normalcy, to a degree. The fact that the Cupcake Class is not at all representative of some stereotypical model of what Pittsburgh “is” as a place? Normalcy, to a degree. The fact that preferences and spending patterns among the Cupcake Class change, and sometimes quickly? Normalcy, to a degree.
“Normalcy” needs some context, of course. I mean “normal” in the sense these are phenomena typical or common for a city or region with medium to high levels of population density, demographic change, income distribution and growth, job and status mobility, and political and cultural ambition – the sort of city or place that Pittsburgh sometimes collectively aspires to be but that all too often it is not. “Normal” in the sense that these are phenomena of market capitalism at work, on a small scale. There are small “w” winners and small “l” losers from an economics point of view, and in a responsible political environment, there are systems in place to ensure that there is money and other resources available that enable everyone, “w” and “l” alike, to participate in the community and direct their own lives. (But I digress.)
If the phrase “the Cupcake Class” is taken seriously, and if it offends, then I suspect that it generates (generated) those reactions because I stereotyped a population (bad), and I stereotyped a population using qualitative metrics that grate against Pittsburgh’s popular self-image as a gritty, worker-based, community-grounded, stable place (worse). Not everyone in Pittsburgh shares a vision of the future of the place that leads to “more,” or “better,” let alone to “different.” And even those people who do share that vision have learned, often the hard way, to keep their public shouting about it to a respectful minimum.
And now: bagels in Bloomfield, not from a package, not in a grocery store. Lovingly made, personal bagels.
In a phrase, upscale bagels are to Pittsburgh in 2025 as cupcakes were to Pittsburgh in 2007. They are evidence of capitalism at work, with all of the good and the bad that capitalism implies. The Cupcake Class is still at work in Pittsburgh, now expanded beyond the East End. Its members have bagels in their sights. (And data centers. I digress, again.)
Will Bloomfield’s bagels survive and thrive? Who knows, although I hope so. But one bagel shop may lead to two. Or more. To competition. To success?
We’ve seen this before. Pittsburgh once had high-quality bagels. When I first moved to the area, there was Bageland (Bagel Land?) in Squirrel Hill, a well-loved store (with a branch in the South Hills, as I recall) that expired not long after I moved to the area. Bageland was gone, and all we had were Bruegger’s and Lender’s and the like. And in recent years bagels have come back. There is Pigeon Bagels in Squirrel Hill, which makes excellent bagels. More recently, there is Balena Bagels in Castle Shannon. Also: excellent bagels. In a word: competition!) Moreover, the baking “scene” in Pittsburgh has more or less exploded in recent years. If Dozen and CoCo have a legacy, it is less “cupcakes” and more “there really is a market in Pittsburgh for high-end baked goods.” Maybe.
Pittsburgh’s broader restaurant scene has exploded, too, over the two decades since Dozen and CoCo were established. But capitalism. Restaurants come, and Superior Motors goes. I come to praise the entrepreneurs. But the market often buries them. Competition.
What do I take away from all of this?
A great deal of Pittsburgh’s collective economic development effort focuses on “supply side” investments rather than on demand side investments. Perhaps too much. Phat Bagel came out of a neighborhood context, the Bloomfield Saturday Market, that was and, presumably, remains generative. Long may that context thrive, and if law, public policy, and individual effort can sustain it, then so much the better. But that farmers’ market and others like it, and more resources for entrepreneurs generally, are no panacea for Pittsburgh’s many economic challenges. There is a new mayor coming to town, and he has hired a top-notch, veteran economic development team leader, someone with genuine big city experience and also with personal Pittsburgh chops. We’ll see where the administration puts its time and effort.
I take the other side of the proverbial bet. Just about everything that I have written here, and just about everything that I wrote about the Cupcake Class 20 years ago, has a “demand side” bias. There is a reason for that. I love the movie “Field of Dreams,” but “if you build it, they will come” is a mythic and mostly false business strategy. Experienced business people know that businesses thrive when they meet a market. Without customers willing to pay for the product or service, the business will fail. It is sometimes possible to find a market, or even to create a market, but a market there must be. Did Pittsburgh have a market for specialty cupcakes? Does it have a market for specialty bagels? Markets aren’t always local or even regional, even for bagels. Maybe Bloomfield’s bagels will meet a market need someplace … else.
Pittsburgh once had a dearth of chain donut shops. Then Krispy Kreme came to town, to much celebration. Krispy Kreme went away (though here and there, it may be coming back). Pittsburgh is now awash in Dunkin, until relatively recently a non-player in Western Pennsylvania. As Chris Briem once wrote, Pittsburgh’s potential for exploiting baking innovation may yet be not fully tapped. But history teaches that Pittsburgh’s baked goods eyes, including the eyes of the Cupcake Class, are sometimes bigger than its stomach.