Popular Two-Bit Cookie Requires a Bit More Dough

By BOB POOL

Aug. 31, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A 40% price increase will take effect Sunday in one of the busiest shops in Westwood.

But that’s the way the cookie crumbles, say customers of Diddy Riese, which is raising its prices for the first time in 15 years.

Fresh-baked 25-cent cookies will cost 35-cent after today at the neon-framed storefront at 926 Broxton Ave., half a block south of the UCLA campus.

“Inflation’s terrible, isn’t it?” said a financial planner, Steve Jakowchik, laughing as he stocked up on chocolate chip, peanut butter and cinnamon cookies while the price was still right.

A sign posted in the shop window apologized for the price hike--the store’s first ever.

“After 15 years, we at Diddy Riese must say goodbye to our old and trusted friend, the 25-cent cookie,” it read. “The present-day costs of business demand that we adjust our price in order to remain a healthy enterprise.”

Beneath it, a UCLA clinical psychologist, Bill Steh of Palms, marveled at both the length of the line and the length of time the cheap cookie had lasted.

“Everybody’s trying to get one last quarter’s worth,” he said, laughing, a half-dollar in hand for one chocolate chip and one peanut cookie. “But the amazing thing is, they’ve held out this long at this price.”

That may be the sweetest part about even Diddy Riese’s sugar cookies. Around the corner, a rival cookie shop, Mrs. Fields, was selling cookies for $1.19 each.

Nonetheless, Diddy Riese owner Mark Perry said he had agonized for months before boosting the price.

“You never know what kind of reaction you’ll get. Anytime you change anything, I don’t think you can be overconfident,” said Perry, of West Los Angeles. “But in the last year and a half it was clear that inflation was catching up with us and we had to make a move.”

The cookie store is named after Perry’s grandmother. His parents opened it after running a chain of smorgasbord restaurants called Perry Boys in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The shop is a popular stop for UCLA students. For years incoming freshmen have been told of the Diddy Riese store during first-week orientation. And, in the past, its cookies were sold in campus stores for about 67 cents each, according to former students.

“You come by here at midnight on a weekend and people are lined up out the door for cookies,” said one 19-year-old student, Youni Kim of Westwood. “Their quarter price is surprising. So I think another 10 cents is fine.”

Christie Ciraulo, a technical writer from Westwood who said she has turned over quarters “a thousand times” at the store, agreed as she treated 8-year-old daughter Diana and two friends to cookies. “It’s still going to be the best deal in town.”

There is still plenty of competition, with more than 100 eateries in the Westwood area and restaurant operators resorting to papering the village’s streets with sample menus and advertising fliers.

Which means that, even with a 40% price hike, at Diddy Riese, they may not be rolling in the dough.