The beleaguered Crumbs Bake Shop told workers that it would be closing all of its stores by the end of Monday, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Here's a statement from a Crumbs spokeswoman posted by the Journal:
"Regrettably Crumbs has been forced to cease operations and is immediately attending to the dislocation of its devoted employees while it evaluates its limited remaining options."
The store may consider filing for bankruptcy. Crumbs, once the world's largest cupcake empire, has been crumbling in recent months. NASDAQ stopped trading the company's stock on July 1 because Crumbs had failed to meet the minimum stockholders equity requirement of $2.5 million, The New York Times reported.
The company went public in 2011 but then quickly began losing money, Business Insider has previously reported.
In June, we reported that Crumbs' shares had dropped to roughly 27 cents per share from a high of $14 the year it went public.
Crumbs was born on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 2003, a few years after the HBO show "Sex and the City" inspired a cupcake craze in the Big Apple. The chain is known for its massive "Crumbs Signature Size cupcakes" that sell for as much as $4.50 each.
When Crumbs went public, it was a ubiquitous presence in Manhattan and had expanded to a few other major cities such as Philadelphia and D.C. It had a total of 35 stores in 2011 and had expanded to 70 locations by 2013.
Unfortunately for Crumbs, many other cupcake shops were opening just as it was trying to dominate the market. The news Monday that it's shuttering all of its stores may be a sign that the cupcake bubble has officially burst.
Our executive editor Joe Weisenthal snapped this picture of a closed Crumbs near his apartment in the Financial District:
Additional reporting by Hayley Peterson.