Goodbye awesome croissants!

A couple years ago, a shabby old neighbourhood bakery — the kind of place with the odd dead bug in the corner of the display case — was replaced by a beautiful, classy new French bakery/café. Not only was I thrilled to have really good croissants and more, but I was fascinated by the business story. The bakery it had replaced was always dead. Now the space was humming with customers. They had obviously had spent a lot on renovations and niceness, and were rewarded with nearly instant success. “If you build it, they will come.”

Right?

They lasted about a year, and closed sometime in the last month. We ran into one of the people involved at another French bakery, and got the inside scoop: basically, they couldn’t sell enough croissants. Too many customers paying too little for the time they spent lingering over their lattés.

So the place just never got into the black. Goodbye awesome croissants!