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.
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.
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.