Definitive proof that the cost-of-living crisis has been overcooked

In these inflationary times, there are many things I am prepared – through gritted teeth – to pay $150 for. Utilities. A tank of petrol. My kid’s orthodontic bill. Just kidding. If you wrote $150 now, and then kept writing zeroes until the middle of next Tuesday, you would have the amount that (as it turns out) I’m prepared to spend on my kid’s orthodontic bill.

Equally, there are a great many things I am not prepared to spend $150 on, and after the past fortnight, the item headed with a bullet to the top of that list is 10 Crumbl Cookies.

The unofficial Crumbl Cookie pop-up at North Bondi.

In the old days, I would’ve thrown my hands up in the air, evangelist-style – and followed that statement up with a spirited “Can I get a hallelujah?” – secure in the knowledge that the crowds were surely with me. But I saw the recent crowds in North Bondi, and even if they’d wanted to respond in the affirmative they couldn’t have because their mouths were full of 10 Crumbl Cookies. For which they’d queued up to pay $150. And then livestreamed about eating.

So, since I once again find myself hanging out alone on The Hill I Die On, let me say again, for emphasis: I would not stand in a queue to pay $150 for 10 Crumbl Cookies. Not even if the dough was fired to golden perfection in its native Utah, escorted to Australia by the Cookie Monster himself, and served on a gilded tray by the two Crumbl founders, cousins Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley, wearing limited-edition loincloth-and-oven-mitt combos bearing the infuriatingly missing letter ‘e’.

Not even then, friends. So how, for the love of dulce du leche, did we come to the point where actual people were queuing in the actual street to fork over 150 actual dollars for 10 cookies? The answer, apparently, seems to involve the unholy trinity of social media, Kylie Jenner and at least one faceless year 10 student, who might or might not know there’s an “e” on the end of the word “crumble”.

But before we get there, we need to back up the caravan of crazy to the end of last month, when a group of Australians with no official ties to the brand sprinkled a trail of Crumbl crumbs across social media, triggering the sugar receptors of TikTok bogans everywhere and resulting in an immediate stampede to North Bondi.

Now, in fairness to our (suspiciously thin, activewear-sporting) influencer friends, many of them did not appear to be cookie connoisseurs and so assumed, wrongly, that the products were being sold at an official Crumbl pop-up store. (They made this gigantic leap in logic thanks to the TikTok account @CrumblSydney and some promotional videos that were apparently nicked from real accounts.)

When they unboxed the cookies (which, given the length of their acrylic nails, was less straightforward than it sounds), the influencers discovered to their filler-embracing horror that the biscuits were stale, having been purchased a week prior from a bakery in Hawaii by a bunch of as-yet-not-publicly-identified Australians – reportedly including a year 10 student – who paid $13,000 to import 800 of them and then flogged them for $17.50 each, or $75 for five.

For context, the same products can be purchased across the US for roughly six Aussie dollars a pop, where they have apparently been feted for their “plump, doughy, intensely sweet” flavour and come in a number of flavours, including one that was the result of a collaboration with Kylie Jenner.

Amazingly enough, the fact that a goodly number of apparently sane people were prepared to stand in a queue for a biscuit and pay almost three times its current retail price has evidently not escaped the attention of Crumbl co-founder Jason McGowan, who arrived in Australia this week to scout possible locations for proper stores.

In so doing, he also promised not to take legal action against the owners of the unsanctioned pop-up shop, presumably because he was too busy commissioning the gods of market research to smash out a bust of the group, as rendered in Kylie Jenner-endorsed, banoffee pie-flavoured cookie dough.

“We have plans to go international, but the amazing response from all the Aussies actually jumped our plans to the top of the list,” McGowan said, adding that the company would open one shop initially and asking locals to vote on where it should be located.

It was enough to bring on the sugar rush to end all sugar rushes, for those of us who weren’t staring down the orthodontic bill to end all bills. A cynic – albeit a broke one, with an aversion to overpaying for stale biscuits – might recognise a connection between the two.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.