Celebrating Murray Lender and his schlocky bagel

You had to hand it to Murray - the guy could really sell. Here he nearly convinces us that one of his bagels can somehow be crispy on the outside and soft on the inside when we all know that a Lender's frozen bagel is nothing but a rubbery roll. No self-respecting bagel eater would be caught munching on one of these baked impostors. And yet, Murray Lender, who died last week at the age of 81, made a fortune in the frozen bagel biz by pushing convenience over quality. And don't knock convenience: I recall the first Sunday morning after I went to work for a newspaper in Newport News, Virginia - my first real job - when I suddenly had this hankering for a bagel, any kind of bagel, and there was absolutely no choice but Lender's (where I lived I was lucky to have found a market that carried them). From Slate's Matthew Yglesias:

Frozen, the bagel became an exploratory food. Fresh-baked products can only be sold in places where you know for sure that demand is high--otherwise they go stale. Baked goods thus tend to be conservative and intensely regional. The freezer changes all that. A frozen product can venture out into uncertain waters and survive as a niche product even if volume isn't enormous. When my New York family went on vacation in Maine, Lender's Bagels were there waiting for us at the IGA. Once the bagel went out into the world in frozen form, new customers discovered the product and the bagel became a nationally available foodstuff. New customers for frozen bagels created new demand for fresh ones, and now bagels are widely available all across America--albeit in severely bowdlerized form, much too big and lacking the textural contrast produced by poaching the dough before baking

The fundamental story of Lender's Frozen Bagels is that the winning product isn't always the best one. Like Ikea for furniture, H&M for clothing, or the Olive Garden for Italian food, Lender's innovated by finding a way to compromise on quality and reap huge gains in other spheres. To an extent, it's thankless work. Nobody wants to stand up and proudly proclaim, "I changed the world with my inferior products." But often this is how the world changes. And if you look at the health care and higher education corners of the American economy where spiraling costs are bankrupting the middle class, you see sectors that are largely untouched by this kind of low-end innovation. The world could probably use a few more Murray Lenders.