The Amazonification of Public Space
Hanging out is a luxury good
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Diana Lind recently wrote a piece for Slate about what she calls the human doom loop—a reference to the “urban doom loop” narrative about cities during and after the pandemic, where the shift toward remote work, having drained downtown areas of office commuters and their economic benefits, would induce a downward spiral of vacancy, reduced services, and abandonment, thereby reducing those cities’ appeal to residents and businesses even further.
Lind’s “human doom loop” is a parallel phenomenon: the social imprint of the pandemic’s effect on physical space and how we use it, which has persisted in various forms beyond 2020-2021 as temporary lockdown culture remained sticky, gaining enduring support from infrastructure that was already in place. This wasn’t just remote work and tools like Zoom, but also delivery services, digital entertainment, and broader investment in the domestic sphere. Lind describes it as “a cycle in which people stop connecting in real life, reducing the quality of in-person activities and the physical realm itself, further discouraging IRL activities, and so on.” We are all familiar with this narrative whether it matches our own experience or not.
These are described as “doom loops” rather than just trends because of their self-reinforcing quality. For cities, increased vacancy reduces economic activity which begets more vacancy. For individuals, reduced social activity reduces the quality of what’s left, encouraging people to stay home even more. I would characterize it a bit differently, though: Many IRL activities are still rewarding for those who engage in them—arguably even more so, in their heightened contrast to the Netflix-and-DoorDash alternative and to our memories of 2020. The pandemic did, however, establish that infrastructure of remote-first life, which remained in place after its original purpose receded. In many situations, for many people, in-person presence became something you opt into rather than opt out of.
Again, this isn’t simply a change in people’s habits and preferences but a transformation of the material environment that accommodates or encourages them—a shift that was already latent before the pandemic started (see Ian Bogost’s March 2020 essay, You Already Live in Quarantine). “There’s a bidirectional relationship underway here,” Lind writes. “The growth of online goods and services is both the symptom and cause of a disappointing physical world.” The overall quality of those digital goods and services may even be superior—Amazon’s benefits are hard to dispute—but the point is that physical space is not where you go to access them. So, more and more of that space needs a new purpose.
As the traditional customer-facing functions of brick-and-mortar stores are fulfilled by online channels, those activities become less essential and command less physical space, which can then be repurposed for activities that feel colder and more mechanical. Lind’s piece describes the transformation of her neighborhood Whole Foods in Philadelphia, which had opened in 2016 with a ground-floor cafe that people liked and used.
“Although Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, it wasn’t until the pandemic that the new owner ripped out this so-called third space. Now the ground floor resembles an Amazon shipping facility: The windows are frosted and lined with refrigerator cases full of groceries bagged for delivery, while patrons queue in a busy gauntlet, cellphones with QR codes at the ready, to pick up and return Amazon packages…In the past, the digital world serviced the physical one; now it feels like the other way around. I don’t spend much time lingering at the Whole Foods these days, and how could I?”
The recent discourse about the decline of Starbucks has highlighted a similar transformation of its comfortable third places into throughput-maximizing fast food operations. Likewise, many restaurants that reallocated space to delivery fulfillment during the pandemic have kept that going in the time since, often to the detriment of the in-restaurant dining experience. Who wants to sit by the UberEats staging area?
Over the years, I have written a lot about commercial (and domestic) spaces becoming more “logistical.” The degraded customer experience may be worthwhile from a cost-benefit perspective—and we can at least hope to recoup our losses in other domains, such as convenience—but the plight of physical space is real. The less pleasant it is to spend time somewhere, the more we feel like we’d rather be at home. This withdrawal, in turn, makes the convivial uses of space within stores like Whole Foods comparatively less valuable, further entrenching their logistical qualities. This is the doom loop in action—perhaps less urgent than the urban doom loop, but a bummer nonetheless.
There are still plenty of great third places where you can hang out comfortably as long as you want, of course—but they increasingly feel like luxury goods, carrying an expectation of higher spending or restricting access outright (there are also true public spaces like parks and libraries, which are a separate category altogether). When a single cocktail costs as much as a month of Netflix that’s enough to give anyone pause. Even dive bars and diners are gradually being replaced by upscale versions of themselves. Those that remain broadly accessible at a low cost are more likely to be oversubscribed (see: any coffee shop in NYC). The reclamation of McDonald’s as a public space is less an indication of the chain becoming more welcoming than of the alternatives diminishing.