Juliana Byers was one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of Bay Area residents who wanted to attend the upcoming Cake Picnic at the Legion of Honor.
Byers, a 27-year-old nurse and baking enthusiast, had seen a blitz of Instagram posts and stories, and breathless news articles on elegant cakes as far as the eye can see. This was a soiree of baking and buttercream, a celebration of confections and community.
So, when organizers announced the third S.F. iteration of the Cake Picnic scheduled for the end of March, people were ecstatic. This one, a partnership with the Legion of Honor to promote the museum’s upcoming exhibit of painter Wayne Thiebaud and his portraits of sweets, was poised to be the biggest Cake Picnic the city had seen. It would build off the success of their last partnership with the museum, as well as the Cake Picnic’s stops in L.A., New York, and London.
Around 4,000 people, Byers recalled to Gazetteer SF, RSVP’ed to a Partiful event page promoting the upcoming Cake Picnic. But that wasn’t a guarantee of entry. That Partiful page linked to the Cake Picnic’s official website, where people could purchase tickets. The $15 tickets were set to go live last Thursday at 10 a.m. (The Partiful page has since been locked.)
“The entire time, it said ‘sold out’ up until the day that they were supposed to release the tickets,” explained East Bay resident Rachael Rosenberg.
When ticket sales went live, hordes of cake enthusiasts refreshed the page frantically — only to find that $15 tickets had sold out within a minute. Berkeley resident Danielle Platt told Gazetteer that she rushed out of a meeting to purchase tickets at 10:03 a.m., at which point general admission tickets were already gone. The only option left for people who wanted to attend was a premium $65 tier, which included a T-shirt commemorating the Cake Picnic tour. Despite the hefty fee, that eventually sold out, too.
Then came the outrage. Event organizers went radio silent for days, despite their Instagram getting flooded with negative feedback. Elisa Sunga, the main organizer, issued an apology this week in the still-private Partiful page for how the ticket sales were handled, admitting to “a mistake and oversight” on her end. Sunga did not respond to a request for comment from Gazetteer.
“Despite having over 1,000 tickets available, the upcoming event sold out within a minute of going live,” a spokesperson for the Legion Honor told Gazetteer in a statement Tuesday. “We understand the frustration this may have caused and truly appreciate the enthusiasm from our community.”
A top remark on the Cake Picnic’s Instagram post called the ticketing process “a crock.” People blamed scalping bots for snagging all the tickets. A rumor had spread that a select few were able to purchase tickets ahead of time. Sunga confirmed the rumor, and said in her statement that some people were indeed able to purchase tickets early. A small number of tickets were made available to Legion of Honor museum members early.
“So many people were saying it was easier to get tickets to see Taylor Swift than the Picnic,” Rosenberg joked.
Byers said her phone froze up from the volume of angry, confused messages in the Partiful page. The anger, she said, came from a “really intense feeling of unfairness” — that there may have been preferential treatment for some people, that the only way for people to get in was to spend $65, in addition to likely bringing your own homemade cake.
“People were upset about how this just feels like, ‘Yet another community event becomes too exclusive for the average person to attend,’” Byers said. “At pretty much every angle, it became inaccessible.”
Byers sent out an all-caps feeler on Partiful to see if people were interested in an independent Cake Picnic. She started setting plans to gather at Dolores Park. Meanwhile, Platt had set up a separate picnic at Dolores Park that Rosenberg started helping out with.
Eventually, they decided to merge their parties and co-host the whole shebang together. Within hours of setting up their Partiful page, the three co-hosts for the Dolores Park picnic collected 100 RSVPs — filled with people rejected from the main picnic. (They weren’t the only ones with this idea, either: Concurrent parties are being hosted at Golden Gate Park and Fort Mason, with each also securing a hundred-ish RSVPs apiece.)
The trio didn’t anticipate the torrent of interest that would come for their humble cake celebration — even though they knew that people wanted to bake and share their own cakes.
“We decided to close the RSVPs because we didn't want 7,000 people showing up and we’re not able to accommodate that or it becomes chaos,” Platt explained, describing the event as a “container” for people to join rather than a formal, ticketed event. (The other two events still have open RSVPs as of publication time.)
“There definitely is a little bit of concern that things will be out of hand,” Byers added, with a laugh, “But I feel like people are usually pretty well-behaved at baking events.”
Instead of the official trademarked Cake Picnic hosting one mega-event come March 29, the city will be awash with un-trademarked, unofficial picnics. Let them eat cake.
