The Cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid introduced in 2013 at Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York's SoHo, generated an early-morning line. Le Monde reported customers arriving at 5:30 a.m. for an 8 a.m. opening. The bakery made one batch a day and limited purchases to two per person, yet by 9:50 staff warned that supply was nearly gone.
The shop separated the Cronut line from customers buying other pastries and posted pavement rules to reduce disruption to neighbours. Scarcity around a single pastry produced a miniature allocation system: one daily batch, a per-person cap and separate queues.