Are You Kidding Me!?! (part 1)

My favorite restaurant lost my business on this slice of cake.

Some time ago I had dinner at my favorite restaurant at the time, and when I looked at the dessert menu, I didn't remember the desserts all being $10, so it seemed like they might have gone up a bit from the previous summer, and nothing really caught my interest, but the waiter mentioned that the owner had spent some time in the kitchen that day making three cakes as dessert specials, so I decided to try the lemon cake with toasted coconut. It had a nice texture but didn't really have much lemon flavor. It came garnished with a few fresh berries, which turned out to be my favorite part of a dessert that was pleasant enough, but there was nothing remarkable about it.
The remarkable part came when the bill arrived. They charged me 12 bucks for a slice of cake! Are you kidding me!?! You can see from the size of a single strawberry sliced up, along with two raspberries and a few blueberries, that this was not a large slice of cake, and as I mentioned, there was nothing remotely special about it, besides the price. It was white flour and sugar, with not enough lemon in it to call it a lemon cake, and the toasted coconut had come from a bag.
I'll show you 50 desserts in PTown that require a lot of work to make, with recipes full of exotic and costly ingredients, with price tags from $7 to $10. There weren't $12 worth of ingredients in the whole cake, which sold for somewhere between $144 and $192, if you do the math, and prep time was under an hour spent mixing the batter, sliding the tins into the oven and frosting the cake after it had cooled off. This restaurant didn't charge a price based on ingredients, preparation time and overhead… They charged what they thought they could get away with.
This is price gouging, pure and simple, and it cost them about $1080 when I took their share of my business elsewhere over the summer after they robbed me on this night, and a few thousand dollars in recommendations I no longer gave them.