Stop buying $3 Boichik Bagels

An Oakland financial planning company that charges $2,000 for its services had some surprising advice this week: Stop buying Boichik Bagels.

“If you are buying Boichik Bagels, you deserve to be poor,” reads the subject line of a newsletter sent out by Lula Financial on Thursday, referring to the wildly popular Berkeley bagel shop that was recently lauded by The New York Times as being better than New York’s bagels.

“The sons of bit*hes charge $3 per bagel,” the email reads. “Effective immediately, I am prohibiting all clients from visiting Boichik Bagels more than once per year.”

Emily Winston, who owns the shop, was shocked, upset and finally amused by the email, which a customer forwarded to her. Instead of getting angry about the attack on her bagels, she decided to post a screenshot of the email on Boichik’s Instagram. It’s now picking up steam online.

“I thought it was just really kind of bananas,” she said of the email, which she provided to The Chronicle. “It’s the same old trope: Stop buying $3 lattes and you’ll have savings. It’s kinda saying the bagel is the new latte.”

Lula Financial founder Benjamin Packard, who wrote the email, said it was intended as a joke and he “never meant to offend a fellow small business owner.”

“I use humour to make financial planning more accessible to my clients,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I work primarily with young families saving up to buy their first home. Frugality is one of the core pillars I use to get them to the nearly impossible goal of buying a house in this crazy market. This was just a friendly (and funny) reminder to be conscientious about their spending.”

As a “Jewish kid from the East Bay,” he added, he actually finds Boichik’s bagels to be “delicious.”