Wonder needs air

Crumbl has a problem. After one of the fastest expansions the food sector has seen in years, the numbers have turned. Average annual sales per location fell about 16% in 2025, from roughly $1.36 million to $1.14 million. Foot traffic was down 32% year over year by late summer 2026. And by early October, at least 57 locations had closed during the year.

There are plenty of explanations on offer. Consumer spending. Inflation. Too many stores too fast. Competition. Franchise economics. The inevitable cooling of something that got very hot very quickly. Any of them could be part of it.

But there's another question worth asking, and it's the one most relevant if you've built something people love: what happens when growth begins to strain the very thing that won you those customers, those fans, the people you set out to serve, in the first place?

Because Crumbl didn't just sell big cookies. It sold anticipation. Every week brought a new menu, new flavors that appeared and disappeared, something to discover and talk about and bring home to cut into pieces so everyone could try a bite. The box opening became part of the experience. That was smart. It turned a cookie shop into a recurring event.

Novelty is an unusual asset, though. The more aggressively you use it, the easier it can be to exhaust. Not always. Disney has run on anticipation for generations, new rides, new films, new reasons to come back, without using it up, because the wonder is tended as carefully as it's spent. But that's the point. Exhaustion isn't a law of novelty. It's a consequence of how you grow.

Wonder has a saturation point

Most organizations think about customer experience in terms of removing friction. Can we make this easier to find? Can we put a location closer to the customer? Can we release more products they might like, give them more reasons to engage? Usually those are good questions.

But there's another side to experience that gets missed during scale: how much attention are we asking customers to give us? There's a point where abundance changes the thing itself. Discovery becomes familiarity. Familiarity becomes expectation. And expectation, eventually, can become fatigue. That doesn't mean people stopped liking you. Sometimes your biggest fans simply stop checking.

I'll use one I love. I think Kith makes terrific products, and I still buy them. But the pace can be exhausting. Drop after drop, collaboration after collaboration, another notification, another collection, another thing you're supposed to know about. Eventually the response isn't excitement. It's "I'll catch up later." And sometimes you don't. Customer fatigue doesn't always look like dislike. Sometimes it looks like withdrawal, which is harder to see coming.

If everything is an event, nothing is an event

Crumbl built an extraordinarily effective novelty machine. But novelty machines need fuel. So there are more flavors, more launches, more collaborations, more influencer unboxings, more categories. Cakes now. Other desserts. Even dirty sodas.

Any one of those might be perfectly reasonable on its own. Together they raise a different question: are we creating more delight, or asking the original idea to carry more and more growth? There are only so many collaborations before a collaboration stops feeling surprising. Only so many unboxing videos before they become wallpaper. Only so many new things before customers can feel the effort it takes to keep the machine moving. That's the moment novelty starts to feel less like discovery and more like performance. A brand can try so hard to surprise us that we stop being surprised.

Wonder needs air. Something has to disappear long enough to be missed. Not everything needs a sequel. Not every spark needs to become a fire.

The opportunity is not the strategy

There's another way to read a business like Crumbl, of course. Maybe you know you've got a trend on your hands, so you expand as fast as possible, capture as much demand as the moment allows, and accept that the curve will eventually bend the other way. That's a strategy. A fairly cynical one, but a coherent one.

Crumbl always seemed more interesting than that. It built a recognizable brand, real fandom, genuine ritual, enough cultural relevance to become shorthand for a certain kind of indulgence. Which means there were other options. The question didn't have to be "how big can this get?" It could have been "how do we take the opportunities in front of us without losing what we, and our customers, love about us?" That's a very different growth question, and almost every successful organization eventually has to answer it.

Growth presents opportunities precisely because something is working. More locations, more customers, more products, more markets, more partnerships, more channels. The temptation is to treat the existence of an opportunity as proof it should be pursued. But the opportunity is not the strategy. Strategy is deciding which opportunities help you become more of what made people care in the first place, and which ones quietly turn you into something else.

What must remain true?

Growth tends to ask: what else is possible? Brand has to ask a different question: what must remain true? And experience adds a third: what should still feel special?

Those questions belong together, because some of the things customers value most are exactly the things that don't scale neatly. Surprise. Intimacy. Scarcity. Taste. Discovery. Belonging. The feeling that you found something, rather than having it pushed at you for the fourth time this week. None of those occupy a clean cell on the spreadsheet. But they may be why the spreadsheet looked so good to begin with.

That's the real tension of growth. You don't want to become so protective of the original idea that you refuse every opportunity and romanticize staying small. You also don't want to optimize the opportunity until you've optimized away the reason anyone cared.

Growth asks what else is possible. Brand asks what must remain true. Experience asks what should still feel special. Sometimes the answer really is that simple: more is, well, just more. The organizations that endure are the ones that learn to tell the difference.

Restaurant Business, April 10, 2026, reporting Crumbl's 2025 franchise disclosure figures (average unit volume down 16%, from nearly $1.4 million to $1.14 million); Yahoo Finance, October 9, 2026, reporting at least 57 store closures and foot traffic down 32% year over year (Placer.ai data), originally reported by Restaurant Business.