In the spring of 2020, when there wasn’t much else happening, I took a long walk through Greenpoint's industrial fringe, eventually wandering down a long warehouse block where a cluster of idling cars at a parking lot entrance provided an anomalous sign of life in an otherwise desolate landscape. It turned out to be one of the few enterprises that could possibly be thriving on the city’s streets during a pandemic: a ghost kitchen for delivery apps like DoorDash and UberEats. Inside the parking lot, a nondescript group of food trucks were cranking out chicken sandwiches and burgers that would imminently go out for delivery with various labels slapped onto their packaging, a list of which was posted on one of the trucks: popular brands like Fuku as well as uncanny delivery-only concepts like “Burger Bytes” and “American Eclectic Burger”—both of which, upon further investigation, had websites with identical Squarespace templates and menus, suggesting that they were different marketing skins for the same product. The fact that I had never been on the ghost kitchen’s block despite living within a mile was no accident—the infrastructure of food delivery and last-mile logistics needs to be near the customers while remaining invisible to them, a difficult tradeoff that Brooklyn warehouse districts happen to accommodate. A few blocks over, negotiating that tradeoff less gracefully, a karaoke bar had just shuttered and transformed into an app-only fried chicken distribution site called Peeps Kitchen. A novel, alien form of gentrification seemed to be encroaching on the familiar version, with inhuman logistical infrastructure claiming territory from more inviting uses of urban space.
The ghost kitchen is a microcosm of the modern consumer landscape, in which a tangle of supply chains and industrial processes churn out a wide array of products to which brands are superficially affixed at the last minute, just before a customer encounters them. Ghost kitchens cynically demonstrate how restaurant food can be just as fungible as anything else, routing a single stream of burgers or burritos along different paths corresponding to the various user-facing portals that capture each order. The arrangement embodies an observation Toby Shorin makes in his recent essay, “Life After Lifestyle”: “Products begin their life as unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item.” In Shorin’s piece, the DTC brands are frequently constructed entirely from code, providing only the thinnest differentiating layers atop their actual products. Likewise, an American Eclectic Burger only exists in digital space; throughout its physical journey from the Greenpoint warehouse parking lot to the Doordash driver’s passenger seat to the lap of the supine knowledge worker who will eat it, it’s just a burger.
If many contemporary products are little more than physical logistics with digital information sprinkled on top, end consumers are typically meant to see the latter and not the former. To those consumers, “supply chain” has traditionally been a mystical or fuzzy concept—whatever happens before an item appears on the store shelf, or between a digital purchase and a package’s arrival on the doorstep. But more recently, those murky intermediate steps have been illuminated, for a variety of reasons: Health, climate, and ethical concerns have stoked broad interest in supply chain transparency. Companies like Amazon have incorporated their logistical prowess into their branding, proudly trumpeting the connection between backend efficiency and customer experience and offering tours of their obscurely sited fulfillment centers. And pandemic-related supply chain failures have called attention to the invisible infrastructure that we would otherwise take for granted. Meanwhile, as ghost kitchens attest, heightened expectations for faster delivery of a wider range of products have drawn fulfillment infrastructure into the familiar spaces of everyday life, with 15-minute grocery hubs moving into vacant storefronts and Whole Foods shoppers rubbing elbows with their gig worker counterparts in the aisles. While the hub storefronts and even the gig workers display their own hapless branding—a dystopian condition, to say the least—the ghost kitchen, so desperate to escape notice, felt more like an accidental peek behind the curtain, just beyond the stage where the illusory value is added. The urban environment, like the internet, has become increasingly crowded with user-facing surfaces and interfaces and branding that conceal or distract from the nature of the underlying plumbing. As that semantic fabric becomes more seamless and all-encompassing, the ruptures become more noticeable, and more telling.
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Reads:
From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone. Anton Jäger revisits Robert Putnam’s influential book about the disintegration of American civic life on its 20th anniversary. “The social landscape sculpted by the neoliberal reforms meant not just an estrangement from traditional parties but a retreat from the public sphere as such, only weakly compensated for by the new medium of the internet.”
Adam Tooze on the political economy of skiing—yet another industry afflicted by monopolization, with the consumer bearing ever greater costs.
Why the Cheesecake Factory has been such a successful chain. “Restaurants exist that have better food than the Cheesecake Factory. Plenty have better drinks. And yes, some have better cheesecakes. But it seems there aren’t that many restaurants that can out-vibe the Cheesecake Factory.”
A similar thing happens with regional airlines. In the same way a hamburger is just a hamburger until it reaches the end user, a flight on these carriers is the same regardless of which airlines its flying on behalf of until it becomes a segment on your itinerary. Same flight crews, same flight attendants, often the same ground handling agents- just at the next counter down than they were an hour ago.
Those ruptures you mention don't happen too often in this space (and I'm not sure the traveling public would much care anyway), but once they do, you can't unsee them.