New and Old #156

Friday roundup and commentary

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E-Bikes Overtake Buggies For Some Amish, This E-Bike Life, Dave Hogan, October 9, 2021

“They would have had to hire a driver or the place of work would have had to hire a driver to bring in their employees,” Mullett said. “That still happens, but there are more people who commute to work every day on e-bikes.”

Another common use for electric bikes is for shopping. The local Walmart store in Millersburg, Ohio, has covered parking for e-bikes and buggies that includes charging stations for bikes. Many Amish cyclists use trailers to carry groceries or use specially made storage bags like these Carry-All Pannier Bags made locally and sold in Mullet’s shop.

“We sell a lot of trailers for kids, child carriers,” Mullett said. “Women can go shopping and take their kids along and put the groceries in the trailer as well for the commute home.”

I see a lot of urbanists and transit/pedestrian/cycling advocates excited about e-bikes. These are not stripped-down motorcycles or anything, they’re just bicycles with a motor and battery for electric pedal assistance. A lot of people see potential for these simple vehicles—which cost more than traditional bikes but far, far less than even a small used car—to revolutionize errand-running in urban areas for people who just don’t enjoy the effort of biking, but can’t or don’t drive, or want to drive less. (There are silly sport cyclists who think e-bikes are “cheating,” but cyclists who are actually trying to get somewhere overwhelmingly like them.)

So it’s really neat to read that to some extent this is happening—but in the rural and suburban areas of Ohio’s Amish Country! Whether or not electric bicycles are permitted depends on which division within the diffuse Amish church you happen to belong to. But the article quotes an Old Order Amish man—the stricter set of Amish communities—who owns an e-bike store and has a lot of Amish customers.

What’s so interesting and, I think, significant about this is that the Amish community is pretty much its own sphere. They’re not on Twitter arguing about the culture war. They don’t think bikes are for commies, etc. etc. So the Amish adoption of e-bikes is a validation of the technology, shorn of what anybody thinks about it. In other words, this is one way to determine that a lot of “urbanism,” broadly, is just…sensible stuff. And that perhaps a lot of people don’t even get to the point of judging these things on the merits.

Read the whole thing. This is a great and detailed article on something you’ve probably never seen covered before.

America’s Loneliness Epidemic Comes for the Restaurant, The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, March 8, 2024

I’ve been writing about restaurants a bit lately, so this was of particular interest to me. There’s a glass-half-full and a glass-half-empty reading here, which Thompson acknowledges.

Given this gauntlet from hell, the following news might come as a surprise: In 2024, the restaurant recovery is complete, by almost any measure….Behind the headline figures, however, the restaurant recovery is not a simple story of universally positive outcomes. The closer you look, the more uneven the landscape seems.

First, although chains are thriving, independent sit-down locations are struggling. This is evident in both the labor and sales data. Employment at fast-food and fast-casual (think Chipotle) restaurants is up more than 100,000 jobs since the pandemic, according to the NRA. But full-service locations, where waiters attend to seated diners, are still several hundred thousand employees short of their totals from early 2020. According to The Wall Street Journal, from 2019 to 2023, sales for fast-food and other limited-service restaurants grew at twice the rate of sit-down-restaurant sales. Meanwhile, about 4,500 more independent restaurants closed than opened last year.

There are regional disparities along with restaurant-type disparities. But the short of it is that while restaurant sales as an overall category have rebounded, the pre-pandemic dining experience, in an actual restaurant, has not rebounded to the same extent:

With every passing year, restaurants are more about filling to-go bags than filling chairs. According to the NRA, on-premises traffic hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic highs. But drive-through and delivery orders have grown so much that together they now account for a higher share of customer traffic than on-premises dining, for the first time ever. Meanwhile, the only parts of the day with growing foot traffic are the morning and late night, when customers are likely to be on the go.

Altogether, American restaurants are shifting from independent operators to chains, from slow food to fast(er) food, from east to west, from city centers to suburbs, from lunch and dinner to breakfast and late night, and from eat-in to takeaway.

I’ve gotten this almost eerie feeling, ever since I went to my first post-pandemic Chinese buffet, that I’ve been watching a once unremarked-upon thing going extinct, or at least becoming conspicuously uncommon. This article basically proves the supposition that “going out to eat” doesn’t quite mean the same thing that it did before 2020. That’s a shame.

Fixing Macs Door to Door, Mathew Duggan, January 5, 2024

This is a really interesting piece—fun to read as a human interest story, but also touching on economics, business, sociology, and class. The first thing Duggan makes clear is how different a company Apple was even in 2008, when this takes place.

I landed an odd job working for an Apple Authorized Repair Center. The store was in a strip mall in the suburbs of Chicago with a Dollar Store and a Chinese buffet next door. My primary qualifications were that I was willing to work for not a lot of money and I would buy my own tools. My interview was with a deeply Catholic boss who focused on how I had been an alter boy growing up. Like all of my bosses early on, his primary quality was he was a bad judge of character.

I was hired to do something that I haven’t seen anyone else talk about on the Internet and wanted to record before it was lost to time. It was a weird program, a throwback to the pre-Apple Store days of Apple Mac support that was called AppleCare Dispatch. It still appears to exist (https://www.apple.com/support/products/mac/) but I don’t know of any AASPs still dispatching employees. It’s possible that Apple has subcontracted it out to someone else.

It’s hard to believe something like this program would exist under the auspices of a company as obsessed about image and control as Apple. It makes me wonder how many other things like this there are, that still exist because of inertia, but that would never be started again today and will only exist as long as they continue to exist.

A little more background:

This job involved me basically taking every form of public transportation in Chicago to every corner of the city. I’d show up at your door within a 2 hour time window, take your desktop Mac apart in your house, swap the part, run the diagnostic and then take the old part with me and mail it back to Apple.

Our relationship to Apple was bizarre. Very few people at Apple even knew the program existed, seemingly only senior AppleCare support people. We could get audited for repair quality, but I don’t remember that ever happening. Customer satisfaction was extremely important and basically determined the rate we got paid, so we were almost never late to appointments and typically tried to make the experience as nice as possible. Even Apple Store staff seemed baffled by us on the rare occasions we ran into each other….

If our customer satisfaction numbers were high, Apple never really bothered us. They’d provide all the internal PDF repair guides, internal diagnostic tools and that was it.

You can imagine how some of these jobs will go: odd people talking your ear off while you’re trying to work on a dusty computer in a messy home office, the super-rich who barely notice just another servant filing in and out of the mansion, the exposure to petty crime from navigating the city at odd hours, etc.

Once you read this, you realize why a lot of service workers can seem resentful or rude: because they put up with stuff that’s completely invisible to any given individual customer who interacts with them for just a few minutes. There’s an asymmetry. Whole groups of people are usually not jerky and insufferable for no reason. If you think people are being that way, wonder why.

This is also notable, and it confirms something I’ve read elsewhere. Apple is consistently one of the worst offenders when it comes to all things repair-related:

The back alley electronics repair guy is the dark secret of the Dispatch world. If you messed up a part, pulled a cable or broke a connector, Apple could ask you to pay for that part. The Apple list price for parts were hilariously overpriced. Logic boards were like $700-$900, each stick of RAM was like $90 for ones you could buy on crucial for $25. This could destroy your pay for that month, so you’d end up going to Al, who ran basically a “solder Apple stuff back together” business in his garage. He wore overalls and talked a lot about old airplanes, which you’d need to endure in order to get the part fixed. Then I’d try to get the part swapped and just pray that the thing would turn on long enough for you to get off the property. Ironically his parts often lasted longer than the official Apple refurbished parts.

And that “turn on long enough for you to get off the property.” It underscores how sometimes these poorly paid, seemingly menial jobs can end up demanding more than is possible. What do you do if a job goes late and the last bus is on its way? “You do what you have to do” is the kind of thing people say who’ve never had to do it, isn’t it?

The housing theory of everything, Works in Progress, John Myers & Sam Bowman & Ben Southwood, September 14, 2021

These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well.

This idea is floated now and then: that basically every seemingly deep, almost metaphysical problem in the West really comes down to the housing crunch. In other words, a lot of cultural problems are downstream of a very simple economic problem with a simple technocratic fix.

So the big question, once you reach a crisis point as we have with housing, is this: can a technocratic fix unwind the cultural problems that arise downstream of the simple problem? Or do they take on a life of their own? For example, you couldn’t have unwound Nazism in 1942 by fixing hyperinflation in Germany. Are all cultural problems like that?

But about this piece. First of all, the housing shortage is real. You have to basically throw out all of economics in order to claim that these numbers are not proof of a supply shortfall which is a chief cause of housing price spikes:

The most dramatic evidence of housing scarcity can be seen in price rises over the past forty years. Average New York City metropolitan area house prices are up 706% since 1980 (or 376% more than US consumer prices, and 326% more than US wages). For San Francisco the rise is 932%. London house prices are up over 2,100% in that period (or around 1,500% more than wages). Prices in Sydney, Australia, have risen by 1,450% (compared to hourly wage increases of 480%). In Ireland, prices have risen by about 800% in that period, driven by rises in Dublin in particular. Rents show similar, but less extreme, trends, because they are not directly affected by interest rates.

But this is the real meat of the piece:

The obvious effect of expensive housing – people having less money to spend on other things – is the one most people focus on. But it is only part of the story, because expensive housing makes people change their behaviour too – it affects where you live, what your job is, how big your family is and what your day-to-day life looks like too. And it’s these hidden effects that are the most important.

This is a point that some housing folks, like Nolan Gray and Luca Gattoni-Celli, have made: the housing crunch is a massive social and economic tax on American cities and on American families, because it forces people to waste money and time and dilutes the fundamental function cities play of bringing talent together and enhancing what a single person can do.

But it affects everything:

Combine these effects [of the housing shortfall] with the fact that higher incomes allow people to have more kids because they can more easily afford things like childcare, and housing costs may be causing dramatically fewer children to be born than people would like to have. There is also a fiscal cost to this, of course, but it is fundamentally a personal, human one: fewer brothers and sisters, less time spent with grandparents, and less of the meaning that children bring to their parents’ lives.

The authors even mention fiddling with the pipes in your house, because plumbers are too expensive, because they have to either afford to live near population centers or drive all the way out from somewhere else. The extent to which the housing crunch distorts the entire texture of American life is unknown, but great. That’s why I think “shortage” or “crisis” don’t capture what this is: I call it a housing famine.

And this is a fraction of what the article hypothesizes. (Economic inequality? Declining fertility rates? It’s housing!) I’m sure this could all be quibbled with; some of it may be wrong. If half of it is right, we’re in trouble.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #155

New and Old #1

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