Take Your Fries and Leave, Slate, Henry Grabar, September 9, 2022

Seven days later, I got an email—“Are Your Cravings Calling?”—that left me unsure if I’d signed up for DD or AA. I was part of the Dunkin’ digital universe now, which is right where the company, owned by Atlanta-based Inspire Brands, wants me. Certainly more than in the actual store. Last August, Dunkin’ opened its first “digital” location on Beacon Street in Boston. There are no cashiers, replaced by touchscreens and mobile ordering, and no seats or tables.

Grabar writes excellent stuff about land use and the built environment, and this—fast food restaurants increasingly ditching their accidental but widely recognized status a “third places”—is a bad sign.

“It’s a way to cater to changing customer-order behaviors,” explains Emma Beckett, an editor at Restaurant Dive, an industry publication. While smaller store footprints and radical new designs are mostly reserved for new locations, she says, the arms race is on to remodel older stores with drive-thru lanes. “Everyone wants double or triple drive-thrus, so those parcels are becoming competitive, because there are only so many corner lots that can accommodate that.”

Terrible stuff—and I frankly doubt whether this has much to do with customer preferences, or whether customers even do prefer it.

Q&A: How Rural America’s Assets Have Been Systematically Stripped Away, Daily Yonder, Olivia Weeks, August 26, 2022

This is an interview, which is good reading. I’m only excerpting this long-ish bit from the introduction:

Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” In the wake of the fiscal austerity agenda enacted by financial and political elites in the late 20th century, the vast majority of the wealth created in America’s countryside “has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers.” The financialization of the American economy, especially in those places furthest from economic hubs, can be extremely opaque. But its repercussions – many of which are often seen as causes and effects of backwardness and small-town decline – are all around us.

If this is hard to code politically, that’s the point. It’s a sort of economic populism that I think we could use a lot more of.

An Ode to the Early Morning Workers, Strong Towns, Karla Theilen, August 21, 2022

There is something I love about the dim, pre-dawn hours claimed by delivery drivers, bakers, hospital workers, and newspaper printers. It feels like backstage access to, well, real life.  It’s when street sweeping, snow plowing, mail sorting, oil refining, and stocking of grocery shelves happen, things most of us only see in terms of the final result.

Ever wonder how those potholes get mysteriously filled? Take a cruise before sunrise on a summer day and follow the smell of asphalt; you’ll find a crew of folks in reflective vests making things nice for you. I’d always wondered how the hanging baskets of petunias downtown stay so lush and beautiful until that morning I drove down Higgins Avenue and witnessed a water truck tooling along with someone dressed in coveralls, wielding a long spray wand and giving the flowers a predawn drink. It was like seeing the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

I wrote something like this once, too. It was about going shopping in the mid-morning on a work-from-home day, way before the pandemic, and watching the crew at Five Guys getting ready to open. I’d never really seen that kind of thing happening, because I just went to isolated shopping centers in a car at the times most commuters do; weekends or on the way home. I never saw the buzz of different activities at different times of day; the suburbs render that largely invisible.

Read the whole thing. It’s important, and it’s lovely.

I Went to Trash School, Curbed, Clio Chang, August 29, 2022

If you used to watch Dirty Jobs or Modern Marvels back in the mid-2000s, you might like this article. A fun read, but also a look inside something very important but pretty much invisible to, well, people who don’t work in the field. Consider it an extension of the piece above!

Related Reading:

New and Old #72

New and Old #73

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