CUPCAKE STORE CONCEPTS

Recently, my wife and I drove around town looking for cupcakes for my daughter's preschool class. First, we stopped at something called the Cupcake Lounge in Grant Park and didn't go in because that really wasn't what we were looking for. Then, we headed to a tiny cupcake shop in Poncey-Highland, which had perhaps 12 cupcakes available for $3 each (We needed 20). The only other items for sale that I noticed were rice crispy marshmallow treats and sad looking office coffee. How does that place manage to stay in business? Not wishing to be raped in our search for reasonably priced, not necessarily ornate cupcakes, we ended up at Kroger. Since then, I have noticed a couple more cupcake stores in town and it sparked my imagination enough to come up with a few ideas:

1. The sign says GUNS & KKK MEMORABILIA to attract yokels, but when they go in, it's just cupcakes, though some with confederate flag designs. Having been lured in, they may decide, "Oh, I was looking for a hunting rifle and a grand dragon T-shirt, but I guess a cupcake will do."

2. A cupcake shop in Little Five Points with flavors such as hemp, hacky sack, nasty burrito, grunge and methamphetamine, three for five bucks. The hacky sack ones can be kicked around for a while until they fall apart.

3. Boutique Cupcakes in Virginia Highlands might have cupcakes ranging from $4 to $8, flavors include acai blackberry for those who will eat something disgusting, as long as it's healthy, the organic chai yoga aromatherapeutic cupcake for the upwardly mobile and socially conscious mom on the go and a microbrewed, heady, pale ale craft cupcake for dad and his sweater vest.

4. Cobb County Cupcakes, perhaps owned by the conservative Marietta Daily Journal newspaper, could sell Newt Gingrich Cupcakes, pompous, red-tinted sweets with white frosting on top and jowls, anti-Commie cupcakes, which are opposed to government-run healthcare for the poor and sick, so are overpriced and benefit drug companies and insurers, and pro-marriage cupcakes, which preserve the sanctity of the holy act of marriage between a man and a woman in a somewhat gay looking cupcake.

5. A cupcake shop catered to successful, urban, single women, much like an idiotically themed local steakhouse that recently opened in Atlanta. The designer cupcakes are overpriced, undersized and locally grown.