Cronuts Are Going For $14,000, Naturally

The summer's Cronut craze has largely died down, with the brief exception of the frenzy at Shake Shack for its Cronut concrete last month. The very existence of such a craze, however, raises a major question: Why would anyone stand in line for hours to buy some sugar-dusted fried dough? Personally, if we're going to wait in line that long for food, there'd better be a baby-seal steak served Tournedos Rossini-style at the end of it. (We kid.)

Putting a Cronut on the auction block, however, takes the banality out of what's otherwise a slightly jazzed-up pâte feuilletée. On Tuesday, the highly coveted pastry, which retails for $5 apiece, was elevated to the rarified status of a prized wine when 12 were auctioned off for City Harvest's Bid Against Hunger fund-raiser. The winning bid was $14,000 for not even a baker's dozen.

Grub Street tracked down the winning bidder, Stacy Hock, a 36-year-old former IBM executive. While 14 big ones is plenty of moolah, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the $300,000 Hock donated last year to City Harvest, whose board she's sat on for the last four years.

Hock had never eaten a Cronut before she joined the bidding war. So, did it live up to the hype? "Shockingly, it did! My hat's off to Dominique," she told Grub Street. "That is one tasty culinary creation. It might be confirmation bias, but I was impressed." The IBM exec divvied up her winnings among friends and other attendees, but she managed to squirrel away one whole Cronut for herself.

So, there's a lesson to all of you waiting in line. Instead of high-tailing it to Dominique Ansel in the early morning hours, just become mega-rich and snatch up some Cronuts at well over market price. Though, just make sure you're doing a good deed in the process. (Grub Street)