Monogram Shop Sells Presidential Election Cups, Cieslak’s Modern Bakery Cookies

This election year, Long Island has its own presidential poll — a humorous and completely unscientific poll by The Monogram Shop/Cieslak’s Modern Bakery.

When a legitimate poll shows that the presidential race is so close that it is within statistical margin of error, an unofficial poll can be just as good a prediction. And the two stores in Suffolk County that sell Kamala Harris and Donald Trump-branded merchandise demonstrate a divided local electorate.

At the Monogram Shop in East Hampton, which sells home goods, owner Valerie Smith has sold plastic cups printed with the names of the candidates every presidential election year since 2004, accurately predicting the winner every time except 2016. In Lindenhurst, 90-year-old Old Cieslak’s Modern Bakery began selling cookies this year with the name of Democratic candidate Harris or Republican candidate Trump.

“We thought it would be fun to see what was going on,” said Eileen Biggs, 72, of Lindenhurst, who runs the family bakery, started by their late grandfather in 1934, with her sister, Lauren Zucker. The white cookies, painted red for Trump and blue for Harris with the candidate’s name in white frosting and the year 2024, went on sale in October for $2.49 a piece. “We don’t have them every day, usually only on weekends, but if people ask for it, we make it up to them.”

Biggs said she stopped keeping track of which candidate was “winning” sales soon after the cookies were launched, but that “Trump was ahead at that point.”

The Monogram Shop sells 16-ounce, collapsible, impact-resistant plastic cups for $3 apiece year-round, but during presidential elections, the names of the candidates are added and a current sales tally is posted. The store’s website describes the cup count as a way to “take the temperature of the election.”

“We started during the primaries (in 2004) when there were multiple contenders and we had cups for everyone, just to see what the enthusiasm was before the election,” said Smith, 75, of East Hampton, who runs 27 -year-old shopkeeper together with her granddaughter Sophie Mengus. “When we had two candidates, (George) Bush and (John) Kerry, we just kept going. And we’ve done it every year since then.”

This year, Trump led Joe Biden 2,610 to 847 as of July 21. The store introduced the Harris cups on July 24, after the vice president became the presumptive Democratic nominee. The latest count as of Oct. 30 shows Harris at 14,1244, Trump at 4,942.

Such informal surveys of retailers about product purchases are not uncommon, said Erica Chase-Gregory, director of the Small Business Development Center at Farmingdale State College. While they may or may not affect sales, the novelty can help keep the store in people’s minds, she said.

“I wouldn’t think it would move the dial too far one way or the other,” she said of the sales potential of such efforts. “Maybe someone will take extra cookies if they buy a cake. Or maybe someone comes in and likes the cups and says, “Oh, I’d like 20 of these for a picnic.” »

“It doesn’t translate into gold sales,” agreed Smith. “A lot of people only buy one cup.” But the effort had a “huge effect,” she said, expanding her store’s reach. “People who would never dream of walking into a store — read: men — are coming in just to buy cups.”

She added: “I didn’t start doing this as a marketing ploy. I started selling the cups in 2004 simply because I was interested in who people were supporting, not as a gimmicky way to attract visitors.’

It’s important, Chase-Gregory said, that the store remains neutral. “If you’re bipartisan, nobody’s going to walk away saying, ‘I’ve been turned off.’ No one feels assaulted and it shows that the business is just having fun.”

In a cookie-and-cup affair, Harris leads in one Suffolk precinct, while Trump in another appears to mirror the district itself: The 2020 election gap between the two major-party candidates was nearly 232 votes, according to the county board. election: 381,253 for Trump (49.40%) and 381,021 (49.37%) for Biden.

Still, during this hotly contested 2024 election, Smith said, her store faced online shopping, despite how egalitarian her polls were. Throughout 2020, she posted daily scores online without incident. This year: “We got all kinds of really nasty comments online that never happen in the store… We just thought it was annoying, so we took (the daily counts) off the site.”

The bakery has seen some of that trouble face-to-face, Biggs said. “You get people who get fired up if their (candidate’s) cookie isn’t there,” she said. “We always have to keep at least one of each (displayed) on the shelf” on days the cookies are available. “Otherwise they are insulted. It’s amazing.”

Smith, who prints her cups at a factory in Texas, isn’t sure when she will stop selling the products this year. After the Nov. 5 election, she can put the leftovers “in a box outside and it will say ‘free.’ “

Or maybe not. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said, “if people want to come back after that and keep buying them as a keepsake.” It’s been a pretty historic election year, let’s face it.”