Anytime I see a big idea referenced more than once on the internet, I stop to take note. This week I came across a post about the fast-casual chain Sweetgreen on the Margins blog (thanks Ian for the recommendation), and I found it to be very powerful.
Per Ranjan Roy:
Fast forward to 2019. My lunch routine is a rotating cast of fast casual concepts, with lost vowel names like GRK and SKWR, names that sound like branding agencies like Maison Kayser and Ole & Steen, or farm-to-table joints like Sweetgreen. On average, lunch rings in at about $15-17.
When I do go to a nearby deli, it’s impossible to ignore just how stark the socioeconomic contrast is to the Sweetgreen line. While the latter appears filled with people who stepped away from their WeWork desks, the former feels packed with the contractors underpaid to maintain that same WeWork.
This represents a much larger diversity problem for cities:
We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where.
We lost the lunch line. We lost the coffee cart. We’re losing the commute. Innovation has bestowed upon us an entire homescreen worth of transportation options that allow us to congest the roads and never brush elbows with those taking the subway. Meanwhile, the crumbling of the subways aren’t felt by an ever growing number of the somewhat well-to-do.
Reading all of this, I was struck by how similar it sounded to a paragraph from Jia Tolentino’s essay in The Guardian, Always Be Optmizing:
But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize. I think about this every time I do something that feels particularly efficient and self-interested, like going to a barre class or eating lunch at a fast-casual chopped-salad chain, like Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a refueling station. I’m a repulsively fast eater in most situations – my boyfriend once told me that I chew like someone’s about to take my food away – and at Sweetgreen, I eat even faster because (as can be true of many things in life) slowing down for even a second can make the machinery give you the creeps. Sweetgreen is a marvel of optimization: a line of 40 people – a texting, shuffling, eyes-down snake – can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale caesar with chicken without even looking at the other, darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding chicken to kale caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for 16 hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.
If that description made you wince, join the club.
Sweetgreen appears to be fantastic. I fell in love after my first Hummus Tahina salad. But essays like these, that don’t even argue the same point, freak me out. Why are such major societal shifts thrust us on so easily, and why do we never take the time to consider the consequences?
I exclusively order toiletries, kitchen supplies and nonperishable food from Amazon. It’s also were I buy my books. It’s just so much easier. But I don’t know that society ever asked for that. I doubt anyone was complaining about having to make trips to Barnes & Noble for their books. I certainly wasn’t. Facebook has pulled the wool over our eyes, and now we’re addicted to the stream of misinformation garbage that it feeds us. Instagram has everyone my age worried that their life isn’t glamorous enough. I realize that all of these technological solutions answered a “need” that we didn’t know we had, but in some way a lot of us are coming to regret how quickly we made the leap.
Fast-casual is just the latest innovation to erode our way of life. Sure, it’s healthy, inexpensive (for me) and tastes great. But what problem is it solving? It has just given wealthy people an easier way to eat healthy. And, as Tolentino puts it, that “life hack” comes at a price:
The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular $12 salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this $12 salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job. As Matt Buchanan wrote at the Awl in 2015, the chopped salad is engineered to “free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data…”
Reading all of this, does anyone feel like we’re somehow being forced to optimize our lives by no one? Like all of these changes have garnered enough momentum to just sustain themselves, unprovoked, until we’re all drinking vitamin purées from camelback pouches slotted into our Lululemon technical chinos?