New and Old #80
Friday roundup and commentary
Secret Menus and TikTok Order Hacks are Out of Control, Eater, Jaya Saxena, October 12, 2022
In a certain light, these could seem like noble crusades, sticking it to multinational corporations through the thousand tiny cuts of half-price loopholes, and allowing workers to let their own creativity shine. But according to many workers, the proliferation of hacking culture has only made their lives harder, requiring them to know a second menu’s worth of drinks on top of the one they were actually trained on, taking up their time with more elaborate orders, and generally making things more complicated.
“I would say about two-thirds of the drinks I would make would be a hack drink or a TikTok drink,” says Jesse, who asked for his last name to be withheld. He has worked at Starbucks locations in Ohio and New York for just over a year, and says he’s seen the number of orders for these drinks increase while he’s been there, and that the drinks themselves have become more complicated over time. “I have begun to unironically dread seeing younger customers come into the store,” he says.
Well, I’m not completely innocent here (ever try adding all the toppings to a pizza through the app?) But this is probably a bad thing. There’s a bit in the story, which is worth reading in full, where a barista recounts customers sending back these made-up drinks because they don’t look the way they do in the TikTok posts. It’s a kind of entitlement, really, that gets a pass because the target is seen as being the corporation, not the actual workers.
Not that you can’t have fun with these menus, I guess, but it’s come a long way since Burger King dubbed choosing or declining a few burger toppings “Have It Your Way.”
How YouTube Created the Attention Economy, The New Yorker, Kevin Lozano, October 4, 2022
If you want to fix a tractor or snake a drain or perfectly dice an onion, you can learn how to do these things on YouTube. Of course, these are not the only things you can learn. Anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, live-streamed acts of mass violence—all of these have surfaced on YouTube, too.
The first part is what interests me here—the fact that apart from all the trendy entertainment crap and the political extremism, you can find an unbelievable amount of pretty normal content, where ordinary people share their passion or expertise about almost anything you can think of. YouTube is to instructional knowledge as eBay is to old stuff. (I wrote about that here.)
So, in commenting on a critical book about the site, Lozano might be right:
One of the book’s insights is that there’s no way to separate the economic power of YouTube from its emotional and psychological attachments—voyeurism is what inspired it in the first place.
But you can also put all of that down and figure out to caulk your sink or replace your kitchen light fixture. There’s really nowhere else you can do that, with the clarity of narrated video, from the comfort on your own home.
YIMBY vs. NIMBY: The real answer is ‘maybe’, Curbed, Karrie Jacobs, November 25, 2019
YIMBY vs. NIMBY often feels like just another culture war, but it shouldn’t be that way. I see it more as a predictable response to a system that forces discussions about the most complex of human creations—the city—into narrow conduits, in which most people affected by a given project come in at the end, when the substantive decisions have already been made.
That’s an interesting way to put it. It’s not an argument for more hearings and public engagement meetings, but—at least for me—an argument to make more room for smaller developers, to devolve the scale at which development is done. There should be a lot more projects, smaller and more widely distributed, such that it doesn’t generally even occur to anyone that any particular one is their business.
This is also interesting:
…Changes that seem onerous if they affect just one neighborhood are less so if they are shared by every neighborhood in the city. They point to a unified 2006 plan that more fairly distributed waste transfer stations throughout the city. And they point to Minneapolis, which last year agreed to eliminate single family zoning citywide.
This is, by the way, why I’m hopeful about California’s statewide upzoning plan, which effectively withdrew the power of localities to enforce single-family zoning. (I think “preemption” is the wrong way to think about this, because the power to enact zoning was specifically given to localities by states, but that’s another issue.)
America’s Next Great Restaurants Are in the Suburbs. But Can They Thrive There?, New York Times, Priya Krishna, January 18, 2022
The nearest major city, St. Louis, is 23 miles away. But on a quiet cobblestone street, sandwiched between a Pilates studio and a financial services consultancy, you’ll find ceviche with delicate slices of grouper and plump corn kernels, all swimming in a tart, ginger-heavy leche de tigre; and lomo saltado whose soy- and vinegar-laden sauce arrives lacquered onto chunks of rib-eye.
Jalea’s owners, the siblings Mimi and Andrew Cisneros, recognized the risk in choosing this quaint street over a city known for its vibrant restaurant scene. But they saw opportunities in the suburbs that they wouldn’t find in St. Louis. Yes, the rent was lower. And St. Charles, where the Cisneroses spent their teenage years, is also one of the fastest-growing counties in Missouri.
This dovetails with what I wrote in my big piece for Vox back in summer. The suburbs are growing, but in doing so, they’re also becoming…less suburban. If by “suburban” we mean the sort of boring bedroom communities that we often mean. I was writing mostly about the D.C. area, but this is happening in major metro areas all over the country, and it has been happening for 20 or 30 years at least. You could say that it’s suburbia with urban characteristics.
Also see this paragraph:
Established big-city restaurateurs have taken note, and in recent years have expanded their empires deep into the suburbs. But many of the most exciting suburban restaurants have been opened by smaller-scale entrepreneurs taking a considerable risk.
Read the whole thing.
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