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momonetmoproblems · 3 years

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On Clout Nine

The Dangers of Social Media Pranks and Social Experiments

Have you ever seen something on social media and the only thing that your mind can come up with is “Why?!”

A popular saying on social media platform, Twitter, in response to the often obscene and unabashedly done acts and statements made is

“Clout is a dangerous drug”.

Lately, it seems like a lot of attention-deprived people on social media are trying to do the most shameful, extreme, scandalous, or ostentatious things for the rewards of the potential impact on each platform.

Clout is traditionally defined as influence in politics or business, but that definition has evolved to encapsulate having influence in online communities and, more accurately, wanting attention on social media.

Over 2 million Instagram posts have been tagged #clout, videos with the same tag have gained over 3.7 billion views on TikTok and, words such as cloutchaser (Bamidele, 2019), clout check and cloutlighting (Nagesh, 2018) have been coined. The word even inspired an app of the same name — “Klout”, a service which boldly displayed one’s social media interactions and engagements in the form of an algorithm generated figure (Edwards et al., 2013.) And, had that platform survived, people would have definitely found a way to wear their scores on their foreheads if they could or add it to their résumé. (Hello, influencer marketing is the present and the future.)

From licking ice-cream straight from the tubs and putting them back in the freezer to persons falling to their deaths from seven-story buildings after failed Planking Challenge attempts (Shears, 2011) or YouTubers dying from a close range shot to the chest during a stunt with a Desert Eagle handgun (Brantley, 2018), so many people across the world are craving the fleeting sensations of clout.

Users will therefore use a sensationalized headline or caption, clickbait, to garner as many clicks or interactions with their content as possible in tandem with the already obnoxious or shocking display, and people fall for it every time. It’s like those completely obvious magazines in supermarkets from the early 2000s that you find yourself picking up even though you KNOW the headline is a trap!

(Just look at these stories. I mean, 2006 Me is SHOOK!)

The development of the internet and social media has created new opportunities for using pranks and social experiments as a veiled means of accumulating clicks and engagement by social media users. This clout manifests in the form of likes, quote tweets and retweets, subscriptions, reposts, shares, among other tools. Stacey Koosel, in The Renegotiated Self: Social Media’s Effects on Identity, states that this need for attention, to share and be a contributing part of the online community:

...motivates people to share more with each other in hopes of entertaining their audience and receiving positive reinforcement or reception of the content they posted, and in doing so, creating a sense of camaraderie or community.

Therefore, according to Koosel, some Internet users engage in “electronic exhibitionism” in an effort to lure as much attention as possible, and become celebrities by the careful construction of their online identity.

While pranks and social experiments can be a good laugh or even eye-opening, in the form of social commentary or satire, sometimes, things go a little too far. These pranksters tend to get so high off of the fame these stunts bring them and the effects can be sobering. I call this On Clout Nine.

Physical Harm

The Tripping-Jump Challenge

Earlier this year, one of the most dangerous pranks to plague social media swept across the globe, claiming a few lives in its wake. The Tripping-Jump Challenge features an unsuspecting victim and two provocateurs on either side of him or her. The aim of the antagonists was to convince their target that they were all going to see who could jump the highest on camera, sometimes with a small cash reward as an incentive. When the middle person jumps, the persons on their right and left kick out their feet mid-air causing them to take an awkward tumble.

The injuries ranged from bruises to fractures to even death.

As news of the prank spread on social media, it wasn’t long before it was picked up by Jamaica’s youth and three Meadowbrook High School boys were met with the consequences. But, this challenge is merely one on a long list of pranks and social experiments that are steadily becoming a threat on our little island.

Popular local YouTuber and Prankster, iHeart Manii (née Kymani White), met his match when he scouted the Half Way Tree area for potential victims of his latest social experiment. For this act, Manii would pretend to find money at the people’s feet, hold the money up very obviously and either walk away or ask the person if the money is theirs.

Yuh ever owe a Jamaican money yet? Lol.

Naturally, the responses were downright comical as most participants were dishonest and, at times, convincingly insistent. Thus, the video was circulated on social media rapidly. Today, the May 8, 2019 upload has since gained over 187,000 views, 10,000 likes and almost 2000 comments. While this is a huge accomplishment for Jamaican content creators, any well-thinking person must wonder if Kymani has really assessed the risks associated with these stunts.

The woman in both screenshots above was the real star of this video as she violently challenged Kymani regarding the ownership of the money, even after being told countless times that the events were staged, eventually causing him bodily harm.

Despite run-ins with law enforcement and hostile responses to his antics from some Jamaican victims, Kymani continues to develop new prank ideas as his primary means of income and rise to fame, stating to Jamaica STAR Writer, Stephanie Lyew, “The more pranks I upload, the faster my followers grow; for example, each time I upload a prank I gain an average 400 new subscribers.” The STAR previously put Kymani’s page at 15,000 subscribers in May 2019, growing from 5,000 over ten months. Today, White’s channel boasts approximately 96,400 subscribers and the ongoing pandemic has not stopped him from executing and uploading his experiments and pranks.

Yes, these videos have proven to be profitable content but at what cost? The unpredictability of Jamaicans is what makes these pranks such a risk to the entire iHeart Manii team. Today, it’s the old woman stabbing him. Tomorrow, maybe the woman is a man, maybe the knife is a gun...

Furthermore, Manii’s pinned prank upload features himself and fellow Jamaican YouTubers, Gio of Gio and Ken, and Rolley of Trouble Link, calling local taxi companies under the guise of heading to the airport with an extremely heavy suitcase. Each of the young men takes a turn being secured within the luggage, unbeknownst to the cab drivers, until the hidden participant begins to struggle and groan giving the appearance of a kidnapping in progress.

The first and third drivers were perturbed and refused to take them upon the realization that the young men had kidnapped someone. The second driver, however, began negotiating the fare and admonishing them for not speaking in hushed tones due to the nature of the act they were about to commit. This was just as, or even more disturbing than, the prank itself and, of course, my mind took OFF:

This clearly isn’t the first time this man has done this!!!

Yeah, I’m never taking another taxi again, thanks, xoxo.

So many women have been kidnapped within the public transport system. Hello, Jasmine Dean?!

Which company does he work for? Mortec?! Gadgepro?! On Time?! Mortec????!

Would he have carried the act right through for the right price?! I bet he would, the scum.

Is he going to be investigated? Paging JCF!!!!

Not ONE of them couldn’t see something wrong with this???

But, I digress (one issue at a time, Monét, one issue at a time). However, my mental tirade brings me to my second point.

Desensitization

Around October 1, 2020, a chilling video of a woman being abducted circulated on social media. In the two-minute-and-20-second-long video, the woman is shown walking down a roadway before she is restrained and pulled into a motor vehicle by four masked men. The man, Nathaniel, driving the getaway car is the woman, Tish’s, boyfriend and the video was originally uploaded to the couple’s YouTube as a prank.

Scathing reviews were aired out on every platform the video could be found as social media users condemned the men for their insensitivity and came to the woman’s defense. However, story come to bump when the video was removed for violating the platform's harmful and dangerous content policy and the girlfriend blamed it on envious people and guaranteed that the couple would come back bigger and better. So...she was in on it?!

In an interview with The Weekend STAR, Trish claimed:

The prank was actually acted out. It can teach other persons. As you can see when I was walking, I was looking. Persons, young girls, should look around and know them surroundings. That was the whole idea.

These men seemed very experienced to several Twitter users, including myself.

Very believable, 10/10 performance.

Who knew Jamaica had so many fine male actors doubling as activists, aiming to raise awareness around kidnapping incidents?

Even if that was the intention, they went about it in the wrong way. There was no trigger warning to prevent potential viewers, or victims from having to see or relive their worst nightmare for a few laughs. The Jamaica Constabulary Force said it best in their statement addressing the situation:

Evidently, Cyberculture is blurring the lines between safe fun and harmful risks, between harmless pranks and trivialized social issues. For a little bit of clout, persons have been seriously hurt, sued, investigated by the authorities or have lost their lives. Social media has transformed the general perception on the value of lives as so many seem so eager to throw them away for a few clicks.

Moreover, when we trivialize issues in the form of pranks and social experiments, desensitization is amplified exponentially. While there may have been outrage in response to the couple’s kidnapping prank, who knows how many men secretly thought this was a good idea, who may desire to attempt it, take it too far, not in an effort to cReaTe AwARenEsS, but to really catch a woman unawares with the intention to do more than shake her up a bit?

Hopefully, these trends dissipate like so many ephemeral online fads. Until then, there is no doubt that these antics will only get worse, affecting more and more lives as this digi-cultural currency, clout, increases in its value and the risks increase in their damages. After all, when it comes to Cyberculture, the road to fame is paved with shame, (Koestenbaum, 2011.)

Meanwhile, I? Feel zero remorse for these cloutchasers and the repurcussions which are sure to meet them when they come down from their high.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

References

Bamidele, M. (2019, November 4). Clout Chasing: 5 instances celebrities have stirred controversies to stay relevant. The Guardian. https://guardian.ng/life/clout-chasing-5-instances-celebrities-have-stirred-controversies-to-stay-relevant/

Brantley, K. (2018, June 24). Pictured: Book that YouTuber died holding after encouraging his pregnant girlfriend to shoot him for videotaped stunt. DailyMail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5878953/Prosecutors-release-pictures-bullet-holed-book.html

Education ministry warns against 'Jump Trip Challenge'. (2020, February 16). The Jamaica Observer.

Edwards, C., Spence, P. R., Gentile, C. J., Edwards, A., & Edwards, A. (2013). How much Klout do you have … A test of system generated cues on source credibility. Computers in Human Behavior, volume 29 (issue 5), pages A12-A16. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563212003767

Hobbs, R. & Grafe, S. (2015, June 30). YouTube pranking across cultures. First Monday, volume 20 (issue 7). https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5981/4699

Koestenbaum, W. (2011). Humiliation. New York: Picador.

Koosel, S. (2015). The Renegotiated Self: Social Media’s Effects on Identity. Alfapress.

Lyew, S. (2019, May 17). Kymani the prankster - Man leaves call centre job to fool around. The Jamaica STAR. http://jamaica-star.com/article/news/20190517/kymani-prankster-man-leaves-call-centre-job-fool-around

Merrifield, R. (2020, February 24). Parents warn kids against YouTube 'killer Jump Trip Challenge' after two deaths. Mirror. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/parents-warn-kids-against-youtube-21563313

Nagesh, A. (2018, November 29). Cloutlighting: From online 'pranks' to toxic social media trend. BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/2f85d272-c509-4d2c-86bf-d4ed4f4e6d9b

Russell, T. (2020). Attorney Going After Miami-Dade School Board After Teen Injured In ‘Jump Challenge’ Prank. CBS Miami. https://miami.cbslocal.com/2020/02/11/jump-challenge-prank-south-dade-high-school/

Shears, R. (2011, May 16). Bizarre internet craze 'planking' claims its first victim after man plunges from balcony to his death. MailOnline. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1387272/Planking-claims-victim-Acton-Beale-falls-balcony-death.html

Taylor, T. (2020, October 2). Kidnap prank’ creators surprised by backlash. The Jamaica STAR. http://jamaica-star.com/article/news/20201002/%E2%80%98kidnap-prank%E2%80%99-creators-surprised-backlash

White, K. [iHeart Manii]. (2019, May 8). “Gimmi me money” Finding money in public social experiment. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQUetpE2V8c&t=703s

White, K. [iHeart Manii]. (2020, March 28). Kidnapping Prank On Taxi Drivers (GONE WRONG) *must see* || Gio and Ken || Trouble link tv. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0HuRomRDzI

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fictionfromgames · 3 years

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2019 (Buffy/Angel Eden studios)

Lawrence Myers (January)

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The cameras never stopped, but years at the firm led to an impeccable public persona. It was a large part of how a two term representative got picked out as VP, but then again, a little help from the Senior Partners goes a long way. He gave a picture perfect smile to the judge, bigger than the tight control he normally displayed, but still just as false.

It would be a while before he got to a place of privacy, something that made him begin to clench his jaw after a while. The American people were desperately pathetic, constantly delaying anything worthwhile, and he needed to get out.

Lawrence smoothed his salt and pepper hair, the only gesture he allowed himself, and largely as a joke for the press. His assistant was hovering in the periphery, and there was nothing he’d rather be doing than delegating long-awaited tasks.

He gestured to Mallory; an hour in and it was far past time to get the hell out of there. No more shmoozing, no more firing up the very amenable base. It was time.

“Sir, we’ve got a meet-and-greet in Virginia next--” Mallory began.

“Stop and listen,” President Myers said, his genial mask slipping into the authoritative annoyance he’d honed so well, “Call my guys at Homeland Security and ICE. I want all funding to IDRS halted and deferred to them.”

“Of course,” his assistant knew better than to respond with hesitation or confusion, “We’ll work up a press release too.”

“America solves its own problems, we don’t need INTERPOL junior here doing whatever the fuck they want,” he declared, “I don’t care who it needs to go through, we’ll start with an executive order if I have to.” “Absolutely,” Mallory complied, writing everything down, “And about the rally--”

“Fucking rallies,” his brow creased, conjuring up the lines in his brow that should have been deeper at 50, “That horseshit needs to be cut in half if we’re gonna get anything done this year.”

“Of course.”

A New, Confused Hope (March)

The tones of the aggravating electric chime rang again. Probably some lookie-loo or new witch seeking locally grown sage. Luckily, it does well enough in pots, so Logan always had a supply for the newly witchy.

He sniffed. Among the incenses and minty goodness of the growing sage, he caught a distinct eau de troll, and... “Hey, Aszea, try not to get vamp dust everywhere,” he called out without looking to the front of the shop.

“Logan, is Janis in? We have a kind of a situation,” the giant woman responded.

The way Aszea said situation made his ears perk, and probably would have without extra sensitive hearing. He placed his book down and made his way to the front, and was a little surprised that there were two people, and that the young woman with the troll was actually the one who smelled of dead vampires.

“Wwwwwwwhat?” Logan looked confused.

“So this is Emily.” Aszea put a hand softly on the girl’s shoulders, “She’s a sophomore at the catholic school, and she just killed like, three vampires.”

“Wait, really?” Logan moved around the counter, “That sounds like Slayer stuff, but--” “Right, she had a little assistance,” Aszea looked indignant, “But I told her about the Augury, and that we may be able to help her learn about what’s going on, and that, while it’s weird to have adult friends...”

“Having adult employers would be a good cover for a new Potential,” Logan knew immediately. He realized he’d carried a crystal ball out from stock, and set it down on an empty stand. “Twenty hours a week of magical supervision, little to no suspicion.”

“Twenty paid hours,” Aszea pointed out.

“Can you help me?” the girl’s eyes finally flickered up from her thousand yard stare. She was still in shock over what had happened, and Logan felt all the deeply bittersweet memories of watching someone learn some truth about the world lean a little more bitter when they locked eyes.

“Of course,” he said as softly as he could, “Just let me text the boss lady.”

Bad Actors (September)

“Well, shit!” Janis cursed, double-checking her phone.

“More amateur mages mucking up the mojo?” Logan asked, leaning over the counter.

“No, this was a test,” Janis held a finger in the air, “Someone is doing this on purpose, poisoning the well, and Iiiiiiiiii...”

Her face fell as she knew she’d have to admit something.

“Don’t know what to do about it?” Logan cut into her thought break.

“Yes, thanks, I was going to say that,” Janis twisted her mouth up, “Did you find the sleep daught?”

“Yeah, but I gotta skip it, Asz said there’s an inordinate amount of undead lately so I’ll be off the leash,” he said without looking at her.

“Any better at it? Can’t have you biting our only Slayer ally,” Janis crossed her arms, partly to glower and mostly to stop staring into her phone.

“I’ll tell you when you figure out what’s going on with the Tumblr coven.”

It was often tempting to throw annoying hexes at Logan, but ever since Myers ascended to the presidency, everything had been looking worse for the magical community, and she couldn’t afford to piss off any allies, even her werewolf store clerk.

“Who’d have thought I’d be curious as to where Phil went since January, huh?” she brushed a lock of hair out of her face, a small act of control in her increasingly chaotic life.

All Saints’ Order (November)

Brian raised his hands in victory. The molotov had crashed through the heathen storefront, and a small fire began taking hold inside. The Augury would be cleansed from his city.

Around him, his brothers cheered, hoisting their various weapons into the air, yells of “Hail Myers!” amongst the more enthusiastic wordlessness. They’d save their country, he knew, they’d start the next crusade, they’d burn--

Janis ended the spell.

“What’s happening?” Emily spoke up.

“We’re minus one shop and plus one openly fascistic anti-magic movement,” Janis responded flatly.

“Fuck,” was Aszea’s whole contribution the conversation.

*****************

So the last post was a couple years ago, and I’ve been watching a lot of Buffy, so here’s some setting update.

Lawrence Myers, 46th president of the United States, was a lawyer at a little firm known as Wolfram & Hart, and spent two terms as a representative for the state of Nevada before being courted, seemingly at random, as VP. When a very unexpected death opened up a vacancy in the White House, his administration fed on the zeitgeist of right wing American concerns and interests: a desire for law and order, fed by a covert program that produced chaos in the form of systematically sired mobs of vampires; fear and revulsion at the statistics of religion, that “witch” was now outpacing the growth of more “traditional” religious tendencies (see: christian denominations); and retaliation, essentially encouraged by the White House with its failure to criticize vigilante actions against apparently “satanic” sorts, such as middle class store owners or their working class superpowered/strange employees. Meanwhile, already prestigious or successful warlocks and demonic allies remained untouched by the ignorant sycophants.

Janis Morad, witch, demonologist, former entrepreneur. “Technopagan” is a term of the past, largely discarded in favor just plain ole witch, and Janis made her first sales online when Certain Social Websites started making witchcraft aesthetic. Using mundane practitioners to fund her own actual magickal ventures, she was largely able to fly under the radar until the All Saints’ executive order, which was supposed to fund governmental policing of Weird Stuff, but also just kind of invigorated an irate and clueless portion of the populace.

Logan Benson, werewolf. He was bit shortly before going to work with Janis, and has been pacified in his wolf phases by Janis’ alchemical experimentations. He’s been more and more eager to help out Aszea on nights as she seems immune to lycanthropy and is both tough and regenerative enough to survive the more mundane mauling that happened when he and the troll first met.

Emily Szymanski, Slayer. She’s mostly around because I had an idea that I liked-- that the Slayer Potential awakening spell was for extant Slayer Potentials when it was cast, not every one of them since. That being the case (how generous of me to myself), beginning in 2018 or later is the perfect time-- as Potentials come into age fifteen years later, we could be seeing one brand new Slayer for every one that has died since s7 of Buffy. This opens things up to a classic high school Slayer experience that we’re familiar with, while also still seeing a few “grizzled” vets in their mid to late twenties. I tend to assume “The life of a Slayer is brutally short,” but you don’t have to.

Generally speaking, she’s timid, I envisioned her as a nerdy Slayer, which will be fleshed out and statted when I get to it.

Aszea, troll. She was transformed from her assigned gender at birth through a wish-- one that she did not word carefully enough despite assuming she’d been quite particular. She wished to be a woman, but not specifically a human woman, and whoops. Now she mostly patrols and is the big muscle of the group.

Beyond this post, it’ll be set concurrent to whenever I’m writing, which is why I wanted to jump past all the time I didn’t include since the first two posts. Characters will have character sheets whenever they get their own story.

#buffy rpg #btvs rpg #eden studios

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gotravel2fly · 4 years

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From India, with love

repost from 21st November 2019 on gotravel2fly

Bir Billing take-off site

Going to India for 3 weeks this year was a rushed decision and everything had to be planned in only one month. We wanted to catch the best possible time for flying in Bir, so we decided that mid-October - mid-November is the best time for traveling and for flying there.The result was amazing, we had the best adventure ever in discovering this country, the people and their culture. Of course, just a tiny little part of India, but it is a start. We've met a few people we already knew from Colombia and lots of other people from all over the world.Places like Bir in India or Roldanillo in Colombia are spots for paraglider pilots eager to fly many hours per day, many days in a row, but suitable from beginner to very experienced level. Bir offers a large range of types of flying: for beginner level there can be local flying and small xc flights, for intermediate level there can be XC flying on the front ridges and for experienced level there can be flying in the back, on higher peaks and can be transformed in vol-biv very easily so this type of flying needs to be very well planned in advance, with full equipment on.

Getting to Bir, Himachal Pradesh region, is an adventure itself, because the place is quite remote. We got our cheapest plane tickets with a 9h stopover in Istanbul, so we had a very short flight from Bucharest and almost a full day of maybe visiting Istanbul. So we found out that Turkish Airlines has some city tours for people who have big stopovers and we made it in the last minute to a 6h guided tour, with lunch included in the old city center and visits the Blue Mosque and Aya Sophia. It worth every minute of it and we really enjoyed this tour.Unfortunately getting back at the airport we found out that our flight to New Delhi was delayed with 2h40min so we missed our connection bus to Dharamshala.We bought our sim cards for getting an Indian telephone number and Internet but the guy said that it wouldn't work in the next 12h..so I couldn't reach my friend in New Delhi who would have helped me get another good option for arriving in Bir.So our spontaneous plan B was negotiating for 2h30 for a cab in the airport to get us directly to Bir on the same day.Our first stop by cab was in a vegetarian restaurant Shiva, where all the food was very spicy, even the bread. I think the food would be tastier without all the spices, but that s just me.After 12h of waiting for the sim cards to activate, we discovered that the guy only gave us the physical sim cards but not registered them with the extra option we paid for... So we had to pay again in some shop on our way to Bir.We had a few stops because it was a long journey, even there was only about 500 km. It took us 14h to get to Bir and I start to think that the roads in Romania are not that bad after all. Here in India our taxi driver was a very good one but the roads are impossible to drive faster than he did. Near some cities, there was so much chaos that I 've never seen before and I honestly don't know anyone to manage to drive better than this guy. But the last 100 km was so long.. They wouldn't finish. We managed to get to Bir at 1.30 am, after almost 40hours of traveling and not sleeping. I was so tired that even after 7h sleep in the bed, I didn't want to go flying. But I did and it was great.The place here in Bir is great, amazing views, friendly people (friendlier than in Delhi I might add) but being tired I didn't want to deal with potential dubious retrieval so I flew in the area for 2h in my first day.Funny fact is that obviously with huge luggage I did not bring my hairdryer. The local solution was to go to the hairdresser, pay him 20 rupees and dry my hair with his hairdryer.

Bir bus station area

The habit here in Bir is to wake up very early if you want to fly far. Sure, that was not the case for me ( because in the first few days I had to get used to the new area of flying, have the mindset that I can do longer flights, you know, confidence troubles) but the others were kind of desperate to fly more and more and so at 8.30 we were already in the cab on our way up. The trip from Bir to the take-off takes about 45 minutes by taxi and it costs 600 rupees. The whole time we had a personal taxi driver, a guy who waited for us every morning at 8.30 to drive us up.The take-off is always crowded even at 9 a.m., with people launching even if there is no thermal, just enjoying the views. In the first days we showed up the inversion didn't let me go too high, but I had nice flights trying to be patient in the air ( the only thing I could think of was Ivo telling Andrei Turnu at the SIV course: be patient, you have to have patience )

Bir -landing area

The food in Bir is mixed: you can have Indian dishes, Tibetan dishes or international cuisine (pizza, pasta, falafel, etc). I have tried many of the restaurants there and everywhere the food was good and did not have any problem ( as I thought I would have).The weather here in Bir is usually OK for flying after the monsoon period, so the start of October - mid-November and also in the springtime April-May. But this year it seems that the monsoon had extended and the weather was still very humid the first 2 weeks of October. Problem is that after monsoon come stable days... There was an inversion layer around 2300m and it is mostly ok if you fly on the higher mountains in the back, but from the take-off, you have to reach out to the inversion and fly only above it. If you fall under it, you struggle a lot. So all these being said, my 3rd day of flying in Bir was a complete frustration because I could not get above the inversion for 1h45min. I started to think that I'm a mess and I don't have any idea how to fly. So I landed, pack my glider, return to the homestay and enjoy a nice afternoon visiting the village and one of the Buddhist monasteries in Bir.

Photos from various Buddhist temples in Bir

the best Masala tea@ Garden Cafe in Bir

After a memorable day of flying, Vlăduț decided that he can sacrifice one day for flying with me, just to give me confidence in flying some distance. Although the day seemed to be the same as the day before, it actually was better as most of the people who took off in the morning managed to climb above the inversion. So did I and first personal record I broke today was the altitude one, I reached 3300m, the highest I've ever flown before with a paraglider. We decided to go to Dharamshala and back and Vladut flew with me all the time, practicing his patience and waiting for me to climb and then waiting for me to glide and so on. The view was just amazing, it's absolutely breathtaking flying near so high mountains. And we flew only in the front, not going on the main ridge actually. On our way back from Dharamshala, on a green terrace where I was trying to get a climb, I saw some animals moving around. They were probably impressed with our colorful wings so they gathered from the bushes and trees. As I could not climb very well there, so losing some hight over the terrace, I was wondering what animals were they so I looked more carefully and I realized they were grey monkeys, like the ones from the Jungle Book. I was so amazed that I circled again around the terrace and I managed to scare some of them away, still, I saw some small baby monkeys.The flight was the longest I 've ever had, duration and distance, flying 6h4min and 85km flat triangle. So 3 personal records in one day. Plus I managed to sum up over 100 flying hours this year, till now. Yep, pretty cool feeling!

https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:raluca_dd/23.10.2019/04:46

The strange feeling here is that every day is different and you can not tell until you fly. You cannot say in the morning if there is a good day or not, the weather can change very quickly and you just have to adapt.When there is overdevelopment or raining or strong wind, you can go visiting some more Buddhist temples.One good thing about the food here is that they have a lot of vegetarian dishes, so I actually haven't eaten any meat in India. I think that this is a good thing for me and I will try to keep this habit longer.The drinking water here is not a problem as I heard about the rest of India. They have here some fountains and everyone drinks from there. I tried not to use so much plastic, so I brought my own metallic recipient for filling it with drinking water.The problem here is the trash. I did not figure out how they collect the trash but most of it gets in the rivers, so the water from the river is only clean on the mountain where are no people. Otherwise everywhere here people throw the trash in the water or they burn it.Another thing you can do when not flying in Bir is renting a bike and visit the Buddhist monastery called Palpung Sherabling, 40 minutes ride from Bir, Dharamshala direction, but on a secondary road(I cannot explain the chaos is here on the roads even when it is not a big city). The whole visit worth it, not only because we saw a big group of monkeys at the monastery, but because I had the best ginger-lemon-honey tea ever and we were also witnesses at the monks' prayers during their ritual. That was an intense and very rhythmic experience in the temple where children and adults monks were singing and reading their mantras and playing on two big drums and horns. I don't know much about the Buddhist religion but the atmosphere was impressive and somehow not that different from our Orthodox church inside monasteries.After many local or very short xc flights, I manage to focus and stay in the air longer time so I get to fly more distance. The classic route is to take off in the morning, go west to Dharamshala, come back and go east to Camp 360.

Baijnath bazaar

The few first days in November weren't that great, it was very unstable weather and it rained for one night that I thought it wouldn't be flyable the next day, but it was. The weather is not very predictable, but it is flyable almost every day.One day we decided that it is no worth going up to the take-off because it was cloudy so we went to a small hike in the wilder parts of the village to see a small Hindu temple. Then we decided to visit a village near Bir, Bashnat, a few km away. So we took the bus because now we were 5 so we don't fit in one taxi. The ride by bus was very cheap and we really enjoyed it. In Bashnat we visited a 1000 years old Hindu temple, just amazing. All sculpted in stone with a lot of decoration.If you like Indian clothes, you will find tons of them in bazaars, all kinds and colors. The trouble is that especially in the countryside there are not ready-made, so you can buy a kit containing one scarf and two textile materials fo trousers -salvar and for the dress named kurta. After that, you have to go to a tailor to sew your new clothes to fit you. It is quite cheap to do that, so I managed to buy a full kit with 750 rupees and paid the tailor 300 rupees. The tailor was very professional and the kurti was amazingly beautiful. We were out dressed in them, celebrating my new distance record 122 km flat triangle, Vlăduț's 150 km fai triangle and the last night in Bir of Kevin and Lisa, our new friends from Australia.

https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:raluca_dd/5.11.2019/04:41

For the last week, we have visited some other places, Palampur and the tea plantations and Dharamshala with Dalai Lama's temple. The bazaars are full of stuff to buy as souvenirs. Himachal Pradesh is an amazing area. All the people we've met were friendly and kind and we decided to come back again next year.Delhi is one of the most polluted cities in the world. We had to wear masks to be able to breathe filtered air, especially because in this period, many people use to burn down their fields and also there is a holiday called Diwali when everybody burns firecrackers all over the place for 3 to 5 days. So the quality of the air is very much reduced because of this. The initial plan was to stay for 2 nights in Delhi and one day to visit Agra and the Taj Mahal. We abandoned this plan when we found out that the quality of the air was very poor with a hazardous risk. So only one day in the big city was more than enough to understand why people in India we talked with prefer to stay on the mountainside, away from the big crowded 28-million-people capital.We enjoyed taking photos with lots of people in Delhi, where we happened to get to a Sanskrit Meeting in an exhibition complex.

1000 years old Hindu Temple in Baijnath

Tea plantation @ Palampur

in Delhi with Alexandra and some nice dressed girls

India, we will come back for sure!

the chaos in Delhi

the veggie momos

#paragliding #india #bir paragliding #travel #gotravel2fly

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krisiunicornio · 4 years

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Best-selling Ayurvedic author Sahara Rose Ketabi has made a life out of modernizing ancient wisdom.

Sahara Rose Ketabi

Sahara Rose Ketabi wants me to stop watching scary movies. We chat about this as we ride the elevator down from her sixth-floor apartment overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades. She never watches horror films. Art plants seeds in our minds that can grow and become real, she tells me: “It changes your subconscious and creates possibilities of atrocities that you would never have thought of on your own. Then it’s in your subconscious, and it keeps leaking in. So then you’re manifesting more of—not that specific thing per se—but scenarios that go along with it.”

I tell her how I’m still trying to unsee 2019’s Midsommar, which is gruesome and harrowing in a way I wish my mind could forget. Ketabi nods, although she has not seen it. Manifesting is one of her super powers, and she’s not about to muck that up for a cheap thrill. Ask her about it, and she’ll tell you detailed accounts of how she’s attracted her life’s greatest successes: a foreword written by one of her heroes, Deepak Chopra, in her very first book, back when she was living in her grandparents’ apartment after college; her husband, whom she dubbed her “God Man” and says she communicated with through meditation before they ever met; and her latest endeavor, Rose Gold Goddesses, a worldwide collective of spiritual women seeking enlightenment and sisterhood.

See also Deepak Chopra on What It Means to Discover Your True Potential

I first met Ketabi in August 2018 when I was interviewing yoga and meditation teacher Rosie Acosta for a cover story that ran in December of that year. Ketabi had just received the first advance copies of her contemporary Ayurvedic cookbook Eat Feel Fresh, and she’d brought a few over to Acosta’s Laurel Canyon home to promote its October release on Acosta’s wellness podcast, Radically Loved. I honestly hadn’t heard of Ketabi, but I should have. By then, her own podcast, Highest Self, had hit No. 1 in the spirituality category, and The Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda was already a bestseller in the Ayurveda space—thanks in part to the foreword and cover quote she managed to score from Chopra.

A Fated Meeting with Deepak Chopra

How did that happen? In May 2017, Ketabi spontaneously decided to attend a yoga and science conference while she was visiting New York City. She was bored, sitting in the very back of a jam-packed auditorium, plotting her escape. “I’m thinking, Right now, the only thing that could keep me here is if Deepak Chopra walks on stage,” she tells me, leaning back into the corner of her sectional as we eat sashimi in her living room. “And then they’re like, ‘OK, time for a lunch break. Now, a word from our sponsor, Deepak Chopra.’” In that moment, the alternative medicine megastar walked on stage, waved “Hello, everyone,” and casually walked off, signaling a break in the event.

Ketabi was a precocious child, growing up in the Newton suburb of Boston with parents who had both immigrated from Iran—her father to attend MIT, her mother to continue her own education after the 1979 Islamic Revolution resulted in the shuttering of universities. Ketabi recalls an elementary school assignment where she was asked to dress up as her favorite celebrity for a presentation. “She dressed up as Gandhi,” her brother, Amir, recalls from Boston, where he lives. “Literally, white robe.” Their father had showed them the 1983 Academy Award–winning film Gandhi as children. “We talked about violence and peace and meditation and the significance of it all,” says Amir. “It had an impact on both of us, but she really took it a step further.” As a preteen, Ketabi threw herself into learning about spiritual leaders and changemakers such as Mother Teresa and Ida B. Wells, using books as a roadmap for what her own path could look like. Eventually she picked up a book by Chopra. “He’s always been a major figure in my life,” she says. “My parents and I would get into fights, and I’d be like, ‘One day I’m going to be like Deepak Chopra!’”

See also How Deepak Chopra's Law of Pure Potentiality Can Transform Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

So there he was, at the foot of the stage, a thousand people between the two of them—an amorphous mob trying to exit the auditorium like cattle—and Ketabi started bum-rushing the stage. When she reached Chopra, he was mid-conversation. Eventually he turned to her.

Ketabi introduced herself and asked Chopra if she could send him a PDF of her forthcoming book; he agreed and gave her his email address.

“So I’m like, This is the pinnacle of my whole life,” Ketabi says excitedly. “I have Deepak Chopra’s email; now what am I going to do with it?” She meditated for eight hours that day, imagining Chopra writing an endorsement for the book. “I’m thinking, This is exactly what I need to get this book out into more people’s hands. If he writes a quote, more people will read it, and it will benefit more lives.”

Chopra did read her manuscript, and as we now know, he wrote the foreword to The Idiot’s Guide to Ayurveda (and later, Eat Feel Fresh). He also invited Ketabi to be a faculty member on his wellness app Jiyo, which led to the two of them hosting a 31-day Ayurveda transformation challenge together and to Ketabi’s online Intro to Ayurveda course. Today they’re collaborating on an Ayurvedic certification program through Chopra Global. “It’s been a joy to watch Sahara grow and expand in the past few years,” Chopra told me in an email. “She is a true example of embodying her own dharma.”

Ketabi says what’s fueled her entire life is living in alignment with her dharma, which is the theme of her next book, Discover Your Dharma, coming next year. Early on, she decided that her purpose “in this lifetime” was to be of service to humanity. Because of this, she started volunteering with at-risk youth in Boston at 13 (after she’d started practicing yoga a year earlier). When she was 15, through a global justice program at her high school, she went to Costa Rica to work in a prison and care for orphans. That same year, she started her school’s chapter of Amnesty International. “I was very into reading about Howard Zinn and counterculture and how we can create change,” she says. “I was organizing protests all the time and bringing in speakers to talk about the Iraq war, genocide in the Congo, and forced rendition.” At 16, she helped build a preschool in Nicaragua—at 17, a community center in Thailand.

“She marches to her own beat,” says Amir. “As a 13-, 14-year-old girl, she was very aware of her privilege. Being first-generation Iranian, we were exposed to a lot of the truths of the world at an earlier age than most—we were having Israel-Palestine discussions in middle school. And Sahara was just adamant that she needed to go out there and try to make a difference and learn about the world.”

"The constant chattering in my mind diminished, and I could think more clearly"

The Journey to Ayurveda

Ketabi attended George Washington University in 2009 to study international affairs and development, intent on becoming an international human rights lawyer. But as she dove in beyond her coursework, interning at NGOs around DC, she grew depressed, depleted, out of touch with her dharma. Soliciting money via an endless revolving door of fundraisers didn’t feel in line with her greater purpose. “I wanted to help people,” she says. “In DC, everything is so political. I could see I was just losing myself in the politics and I wasn’t using my creativity.”

To make matters worse, Ketabi’s physical health was failing. She transferred to Boston University to be closer to her family and started a blog (the first iteration of Eat Feel Fresh) to share some of the recipes and positive psychology she was studying in her free time to try and combat undiagnosed digestive issues. It was through writing and sharing her journey directly with readers that she tapped back into her higher calling. Armed with a newfound hope, she enrolled to become a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.

See also 7 Chakra-balancing Ayurvedic Soup Recipes

At 21 years old, Ketabi was 87 pounds with hypothalamic amenorrhea when, through her coursework, she discovered Ayurveda—the ancient system of medicine based on the idea that health is achieved through balancing bodily systems using diet, herbal treatments, and yogic breathwork. “All my health problems—but also my personality—were explained,” Ketabi says. Suddenly her body started to heal. “The first thing I noticed was that I could sleep at night,” she says. “The constant chattering in my mind diminished, and I could think more clearly. I felt more grounded and peaceful than ever before. And I could finally digest food without curling up on the couch in pain.”

Unsatisfied with the limited resources available to study Ayurveda in the US, Ketabi went to India to attend Ayurveda school outside of Delhi. As a Persian American who is 50 percent Indian, she had always felt a deep connection with India and its culture. For two years, she immersed herself in Ayurvedic philosophy and began thinking about how to update it for contemporaries: For instance, traditional Ayurveda doesn’t allow for the consumption of raw foods—which makes sense when you consider the contaminated soil and lack of refrigeration in Ancient India, she says. However, modern nutrition encourages us to eat fresh raw fruits and vegetables, so she’s reformed certain recipes accordingly.

See also Putting Ayurvedic Theory IRL Terms: What Your Dosha Really Says About You

Channeling the Goddess Archetypes for Connection and Transformation

It was while studying Ayurveda in India that Ketabi began leading goddess retreats (see Find Your Inner Goddess). She had grown up surrounded by imagery of Persian and Indian deities, but it was her yoga practice and her travels to India, she says, that brought her deeper into her study of Hindu and Vedic goddesses. As I write this, Ketabi is preparing for the LA launch party celebrating Rose Gold Goddesses, her online platform for spiritual women to connect, converse, plan meetups, and explore the goddess archetypes from cultures around the world. Members have access to a Monthly Goddess Guide full of yoga practices, rituals, meditations, music, mantras, mudras, and journaling prompts—all related to each month’s chosen goddess. She texts me a little video of herself “getting glammed up” for the event, her face painted in the likeness of the Hindu goddess Kali, destroyer of evil forces.

See also The Yogini's Guide to Starting Your Own Women’s Circle

When I asked her about criticisms regarding cultural appropriation, she was cool and confident and largely unfazed. “Am I allowed to talk about goddesses if I didn’t grow up in a polytheistic religion?” she asks me rhetorically. “Goddesses exist and have always existed in every religion and every culture—it’s a universal archetype that we can all step into.” We have just finished lunch and are getting into it in her living room like old friends might. “We’re human beings,” she says. “But some people are so focused on our differences instead of our similarities.”

I visit Ketabi again at home on a cloudless Friday in September when Rose Gold Goddesses has been live for almost a month. The goddess she has chosen to celebrate this month is Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, music, art, and nature. Ketabi has organized a little gathering of friends at her home for a goddess ceremony, a ritual to honor the divine feminine, creativity, and, of course, Saraswati.

We assemble in her living room, sunshine pouring in from all angles, and Ketabi opens by blessing each of us with a single rose: The flower signifies “beauty, elegance, strength, and wisdom,” she says. But also, “Roses are not to be trifled with. You can’t just get a rose and make it your own. She has thorns, she’ll fight back.” This represents all of us in the circle right now, she tells us, post #MeToo, in Trump’s America. “As women, we want to share our beauty and the full spectrum of who we are, but there’s this dark spot in society that makes us feel like we’re not safe.” And yet we are all here, supporting women in the community and thriving in our personal and professional lives. And why is that? She asks, then answers: “It’s because we’re the rose.”

For more information on goddess archetypes, take Sahara's quiz and check out her oracle deck and guidebook, A Yogic Path.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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cedarrrun · 4 years

Link

Best-selling Ayurvedic author Sahara Rose Ketabi has made a life out of modernizing ancient wisdom.

Sahara Rose Ketabi

See also Deepak Chopra on What It Means to Discover Your True Potential

A Fated Meeting with Deepak Chopra

See also How Deepak Chopra's Law of Pure Potentiality Can Transform Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

Ketabi introduced herself and asked Chopra if she could send him a PDF of her forthcoming book; he agreed and gave her his email address.

"The constant chattering in my mind diminished, and I could think more clearly"

The Journey to Ayurveda

See also 7 Chakra-balancing Ayurvedic Soup Recipes

See also Putting Ayurvedic Theory IRL Terms: What Your Dosha Really Says About You

Channeling the Goddess Archetypes for Connection and Transformation

See also The Yogini's Guide to Starting Your Own Women’s Circle

For more information on goddess archetypes, take Sahara's quiz and check out her oracle deck and guidebook, A Yogic Path.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

0 notes

amyddaniels · 4 years

Text

Meet Sahara Rose Ketabi, Contemporary Queen

Best-selling Ayurvedic author Sahara Rose Ketabi has made a life out of modernizing ancient wisdom.

Sahara Rose Ketabi

See also Deepak Chopra on What It Means to Discover Your True Potential

A Fated Meeting with Deepak Chopra

See also How Deepak Chopra's Law of Pure Potentiality Can Transform Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

Ketabi introduced herself and asked Chopra if she could send him a PDF of her forthcoming book; he agreed and gave her his email address.

"The constant chattering in my mind diminished, and I could think more clearly"

The Journey to Ayurveda

See also 7 Chakra-balancing Ayurvedic Soup Recipes

See also Putting Ayurvedic Theory IRL Terms: What Your Dosha Really Says About You

Channeling the Goddess Archetypes for Connection and Transformation

See also The Yogini's Guide to Starting Your Own Women’s Circle

For more information on goddess archetypes, take Sahara's quiz and check out her oracle deck and guidebook, A Yogic Path.

0 notes

outputcongo2-blog · 5 years

Text

New Record Pressing Plant Drops The Needle In Old Bread Factory

General Baking Company’s Bond Bread factory at 300 E. Godfrey Avenue. The owner plans to reactivate the old industrial site through co-working space, art studios, and light manufacturing like Softwax’s vinyl record pressing plant. | Photo: Michael Bixler

As you first approach the Bond Bread building in the Lawncrest section of North Philadelphia, it appears to be exactly what it once was—an old, abandoned factory. However, the closer you get to the Godfrey Avenue site it begins to display new signs of life. There is hustle and bustle going through the front doors, and the loading dock is filled with trucks making deliveries. It is here that I meet Federico Casanova of the soon-to-be-open Softwax Records plant, the only vinyl record production facility in the area. Like many other start-up businesses—from Amazon shipping subsidiaries to commercial kitchens—Softwax has decided to make their home in this massive, recently unused industrial site.

For nearly six decades, beginning in 1921, the building was home to General Baking Company’s Bond Bread factory, once a staple of the neighborhood and an employer to many of its residents. It was said by some who lived nearby that during the height of the company’s production you could smell the bakery from a mile away. After closing its doors in 1981, the Bond Building became the home to a Ports of The World outlet, an offshoot of Boscov’s department stores. In the mid-1990’s the Ports of The World store was transformed into a regular Boscov’s before closing for good in early 2005. The space then spent years almost entirely untouched.

Putting Local Pressing on the Platter

Casanova’s friends call him “Kiko,” and his warm, upbeat presence immediately makes you feel like one of them. As we first enter the warehouse, he guides me on a tour through a giant maze of boxes, furniture, and forklifts. It was in this room where the former Boscov’s department store was held. There are even some vestiges of this iteration in the form of lighting fixtures and signs advertising layaway.

As we push past to the back, Casanova opens the doors to what will soon be the Softwax plant. Although there’s not yet much in the huge space, you can hear the excitement in his voice about what is to come. The cavernous white room seems to inspire Casanova as a blank canvas soon to be filled with multiple record pressing machines, offices, and employees.

The Bond Building is still a work-in-progress, but will soon be the home to even more workspaces, storage units, meeting rooms, shipping centers, and kitchens, along with the companies operating out of them. This repurposing of the historic space excites Casanova. “That’s part of what I love about it,” he says. “It’s like we’re part of a revitalization.”

Bond Bread’s Lawncrest factory circa 1930s-40s. | Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Casanova was born in Miami and spent his first 18 years there. An artist and musician, it was only after his brother moved to Philadelphia and invited him to come visit that he began to think about moving here.

“I fell in love with the city as soon as I got here. I went to go visit a couple months [after the first visit] and it just solidified my love for the city. It was really cool. I never experienced a city that had as many like-minded people as me. I met so many people that were out there doing the same things that I was doing.”

While living in a South Philly house that hosted bands from around the city, country, and world, Casanova noticed that many of the groups were playing songs they had written over a year-and-a-half before that, since that’s how long it took them to get the songs pressed on vinyl and make them available to sell. With no local pressing plants around, there was definitely a market out there.

“My engineering friend said, ‘We should look at pressing records. How hard could it be?’ Turns out, really hard,” Casanova laughs, “and really expensive!”

In 2013, he set out to make this dream a reality, although not without its hurdles. Since the industry was so small at the time, he found almost nothing about it online. Casanova eventually contacted Chris Moss of Lathe Trolls, an online record pressing forum, for advice.

“[Moss] ripped us a new one,” Casanova remembers. “He told us we don’t know what we’re doing, so we start writing notes. After about an hour and a half of him teaching us everything, my team was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore. This doesn’t sound fun.’” With his team bowing out, not only did Casanova still want to pursue the record plant, he “wanted to do it even more after that.”

Federico Casanova in Softwax’s production space next to a vinyl record pressing machine. The group plans to acquire five more machines with a goal of pressing a record every 30 to 40 seconds. | Photo: Michael Bixler

The next step was getting a business plan together, which was difficult. To get accurate numbers, he called up every supplier he could find until he finally got it done. Casanova even took business classes to learn more about what goes into making a start-up.

Now armed with some concrete numbers to show people, he got a job at a record pressing plant in New Jersey, one that prints vinyl exclusively for major labels like Epitaph Records. He even met his current engineer Dan Greathouse there.

Casanova eventually moved back to Miami to work for another record pressing start-up. “That’s where I learned a lot,” he admits, “but also learned a lot about what not to do. It was a start-up and you’re gonna mess up sometimes.”

So why vinyl? “Listening to a vinyl is extremely engaging,” Casanova says. “The whole ritual of it is cool, the sound is super warm, the artwork blows my mind.”

His love for the format and of music helped him to stick to his dream, even during the harder times.

“There was a time when I was selling insurance just to try to save up money to have capital for the business,” Casanova recalls. “The days would be at the office, making phone calls and going out to meetings. I would come back home around 10pm just beat and all I would do is go back to the record player, put on the headphones, kick my legs up and damn, it felt so good. That was the highlight of the day.”

The Bond Building’s water tower and smokestack tower above the building. Plans for the area behind the factory include recreational green space for tenants. | Photo: Michael Bixler

Although it had been a long process, Casanova, along with engineer Greathouse and Michael J. Wodnicki, Softwax’s chief technical and financial officer, finally began to searching for a building that would have everything they needed. They ended up spending nearly six months with no luck.

The team told their realtor, “We’re wasting time looking at every property. Let’s only look at properties that have high-pressure gas lines installed.” To run the record-pressing machines, it’s imperative to have high-pressure gas lines. Installing some would cost around $100,000 and would take weeks.

“We should have been doing that from the get-go,” Casanova says, “but we just didn’t know. There’s no guidelines on how to be doing this. It’s an industry that’s been asleep since the 1980s. Only the big companies stayed alive.”

Once they found the Bond Building, the crew at Softwax knew it was the perfect spot for their goal of making affordable records for local bands, something that Casanova knows is needed in the area. “It would make sense because shipping vinyl costs about $500 or $600, so they’re already saving money on shipping alone.”

The boiler room and gas should be ready by the end of July with production kicking off in the fall if all goes well. Casanova says there will be four presses at first, with the ultimate goal of six machines pressing a record every 30 to 40 seconds.

About the author

Bryan Bierman is a freelance writer from Philadelphia. He has written for such publications as AV Club, Village Voice, Red Bull Music Academy, Philadelphia City Paper and others. His favorite water ice flavor is cherry, hands down.

Source: https://hiddencityphila.org/2019/07/new-record-pressing-plant-drops-the-needle-in-old-bread-factory/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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med20 · 5 years

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In 1993, Ruth Riechl, the new restaurant critic for the New York Times, penned a memorable review of Sirio Maccioni’s elegant Manhattan restaurant Le Cirque (which closed, at least temporarily, in January 2018). Riechl described two distinct experiences she had at the establishment, first as an anonymous diner, then as a recognized Times food critic; in the first instance, she received a bad seat after a long wait, was treated rudely, then served food that was (relatively) mediocre. But once she was recognized as a VIP, she was duly treated like royalty – felicitous seating, solicitous service, and sublime food. In presenting these experiences together, Riechl highlighted both the typical meal experience of most diners as well as the transcendent experience that was possible. (I went to Le Cirque in the mid-80s to celebrate my high school graduation, in my pre-low-carb days; while I can’t remember where we sat, the food, particularly the legendary potato-wrapped bass, was delicious).

It occurred to me that in many ways, innovation at large pharmas can be experienced very similarly – so often, disappointing and stifling, but occasionally, under the right circumstances, transformative and elating.

This dual-nature of pharma innovation may explain both why so many innovators are repelled by large pharma companies, yet some – including those focused on digital and data – are deliberately seeking out opportunities in these corporations.

In contrast to big drug companies, the appeal of startups is easy to understand – the self-actualization, the sense that your individual contribution not only matters but is essential, the feeling of David vs Goliath, the allure of significant upside, both in terms of impact (disruption, making the world a better place, etc.) and financial return. You can really get a good feel for this by watching the HBO Theranos movie, The Inventor, where you can see how so many people were drawn to the startup for this powerful combination of reasons. According to this documentary at least, Theranos offered all these elements, lacking only an actual, functional product and an achievable plan to create one. (My thoughts on Carreyrou's Theranos book, Bad Blood, are here.)

What’s interesting to me is the increasing number of well-trained, innovative people I seem to be running into, particularly on the digital and data side, who are coming to large companies after spending time in health tech startups, not because they’ve somehow given up on their dreams, but rather because, in some ways, they’re more serious about them, and are seeking more than the superficial accouterments of tech startups (so brutally described in Disrupted, by Dan Lyons). Moreover, these innovators are joining large companies with eyes wide open; they recognize the very real, and highly problematic challenges large companies have with agility and decision-making. Nevertheless, it seems like these innovators (at least the few I’ve met) hunger for the chance to really make a difference in the application of tech to health and drug discovery and development, to work towards a result not twitter-worthy but FDA-worthy, in the context of a well-resourced and credible organization capable of responsibly delivering it.

(Disclosure/reminder: as a corporate VC, I arguably have a foot in both pharma and startup camps.)

The Bad News

First, the bad news. The equivalent to entering Le Cirque as an anonymous patron in 1993 is joining pharma and trying to innovate against the grain. Everything is arrayed against you.

Large organizations tend to be remarkably risk-adverse, essentially because they have an established, successful enterprise and generally worry more about the downside risk of any given opportunity then the upside possibility it could represent. The implicit calculation is pretty simple: one screw-up could bring the whole organization down, while one striking success is unlikely to move the needle all that much. In contrast, startups tend to have very little to lose, and if they’re lucky and/or good, a lot to gain – hence their view of risk is quite different.

To be sure, in most large organizations, no one wants to inhibit innovation -- at least not explicitly. Innovation, like failure, is something to publicly cherish and visibly celebrate – the kind of thing that’s abstractly good for an organization to value, but generally not needed or welcome in your operational group, where you’re already plenty busy trying to get defined tasks completed, thank you very much.

But even if you’re skeptical about innovative proposals, to operate successfully in large, highly matrixed organization, you need to maintain generally cordial relationships with as many people as possible. The result is what I first wrote about in 2011, when a senior pharma executive who had recently transitioned to industry from a top Harvard hospital remarked to me that:

“his greatest shock upon joining the business world, the thing he was least prepared for, wasn’t the business vocabulary, the timelines, the quarterly expectations of wall street analysts – none of the above. Instead, it was dealing with the passive aggressive behavior he discovered everywhere around him.”

It’s a phenomenon I’ve described as “innovation dissipation,” where no one explicitly says “no” to a new idea, it just winds up ping-ponging through an organization until it eventually peters out.

Recently, a colleague offered what I thought was an astute explanation for this phenomenon: “Why spend political capital saying ‘no?’” he asked me. He’s right. The savviest, most senior players in complex organizations seem especially adept at this, politely taking meetings and pursing their lips while listening thoughtfully, and then suggesting several follow-up meetings they know full well aren’t likely to lead anywhere.

It turns out, there’s even a phrase for this mindset: “trust the process.” This may not have started out as cynical in spirit, but in practice, in a large organization, it basically means let the process play out, and don’t try to rock the boat by interfering. The result – as Safi Bahcall brutally describes in Loonshots (my WSJ review here, and my more detailed discussion of this exact point here) – is a culture where everyone is highly attuned to the (perceived) views of those at the apex of the hierarchy, and original, orthogonal, or non-incremental perspectives will struggle to be heard. That’s the system, and often the fate of bottom-up innovation within it.

At this point, would be innovators out there might be ready to don their Allbirds, sling their Herschel backpacks over their shoulders, grab their Sightglass lattes, and head off the to closest WeWork.

Not so fast. I’ve recently spoken with several health tech innovators who actually did something more or less like this early in their careers, then quite deliberately choose to take their talents to large pharma companies with many of the liabilities enumerated above. What were they thinking?

The Good News: The Three Rs

Turns out that, like VIPs dining at Le Cirque, innovators who find themselves aligned with and integrated into pharma strategy may be treated to an exceptional experience. According to several such well-situated innovators, large, incumbent companies have a lot going for them; in particular: resources, redundancy, and results.

The resource aspect is fairly obvious: when a large company truly commits to a particular strategy, approach, or technology, they are able to pursue this goal in a deep, remarkably thorough way, deploying people, capital, and leveraging (as well as acquiring) institutional know-how. Example: a few months ago, I heard a senior pharma oncology leader describe the way they were approaching a particular category of high-priority targets, and it was mind-blowing in scope, staggeringly comprehensive. Multiple options were systematically evaluated at almost every step in the process – truly the “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE)” concept applied to a particular area of biological discovery. Offerings from many startups were considered at each of these stages, and it was hard not to be struck by the observation that while a small company could potentially optimize one particular solution or approach, the large pharma could effectively afford to choose from among these to pick the best one.

The second, often underappreciated aspect that several innovators kept returning to is the redundancy and depth you see in big pharma; I was regaled with stories of how, in startups, you often have only a single person in a key area like legal or regulatory, and you are disproportionately dependent on their expertise, not only in terms of what they know, but also their ability to recognize their own gaps. Obviously, there is a huge emphasis in startups in hiring excellent people, but in many ways, startups operate largely without a net, a precarious situation which can, and often does, prove disastrous to young companies.

The last, and in some ways most important difference between startups and large companies is that at the end of the day, many startups just need to look promising enough to justify an acquisition or an IPO – sizzle with the promise of steak. But at a large company, the buck stops with you in many ways; your business depends not on the glamor or glitz of an emerging technology, but on actually getting it to work, and getting it to market. Thus a buzzy startup like Stemcentrx could make billions for its investors, yet ultimately fail in the hands of the pharma company who acquired it and tried to bring the products to market. The jury still seems to be out for the early CAR-T companies (including Juno, acquired by Celgene [itself acquired by BMS], and Kite, acquired by Gilead). (Disclosure: my wife works at Gilead though not in oncology.)

Just as academia tends to attract researchers who pursue novel science, and biotech startups often attract researchers keen to turn raw science into promising therapeutics, pharma attracts many researchers with the determination and patience to see raw science and promising therapeutics through to approval and into the clinic. Their mission is achieving clinical impact at scale, and it’s a powerful draw for some innovators.

Bottom Line

Pharmas are attractive for innovators pursuing approaches that are strongly endorsed by senior leadership and reasonably welcomed by the operational areas of the organization. The way some pharmas are working through the complex supply-chain logistics required for delivering CAR-T therapy or gene therapy at scale offer striking examples.

On the other hand, pharma organizations generally prioritize caution over agility, and incremental change over radical new approaches. Thus even innovation welcomed by the C-suite (like a lot of the original digital and data efforts) can run into the grindstone when those in the trenches can’t see the benefit, and experience only burden.

In general, large pharmas, like other big companies, are likely to remain generally resistant to profound innovation, though they will embrace and really go after specific opportunities they view as adequately validated or promising. Such traction requires explicitly endorsement and constant, active support from the top echelons of management if the approach is to even have a chance. Meanwhile, detached innovation initiatives reliably garner transient publicity but tend to achieve little durable organizational impact.

There’s likely a considerable opportunity to harness the many bottom-up innovative ideas to which pharma seems constitutively unable to respond; the robust startup ecosystem offers an attractive alternative or salvage pathway for some but not all of these promising approaches.

#Digital Pharma #DigPharm #SXSH #Health Innovation #Digital Health #Big Pharma

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ravishankarsivasubramaniam · 5 years

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The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store

Joe Fassler | The New Food Economy & Longreads | April 2019 | 8,802 words (33 minutes)

This story is published in partnership with The New Food Economy, with reporting supported by the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2014, Rich Niemann, president and CEO of the Midwestern grocery company Niemann Foods, made the most important phone call of his career. He dialed the Los Angeles office of Shook Kelley, an architectural design firm, and admitted he saw no future in the traditional grocery business. He was ready to put aside a century of family knowledge, throw away all his assumptions, completely rethink his brand and strategy — whatever it would take to carry Niemann Foods deep into the 21st century.

“I need a last great hope strategy,” he told Kevin Kelley, the firm’s cofounder and principal. “I need a white knight.”

Part square-jawed cattle rancher, part folksy CEO, Niemann is the last person you’d expect to ask for a fresh start. He’s spent his whole life in the business, transforming the grocery chain his grandfather founded in 1917 into a regional powerhouse with more than 100 supermarkets and convenience stores across four states. In 2014, he was elected chair of the National Grocery Association. It’s probably fair to say no one alive knows how to run a grocery store better than Rich Niemann. Yet Niemann was no longer sure the future had a place for stores like his.

He was right to be worried. The traditional American supermarket is dying. It’s not just Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, an acquisition that trade publication Supermarket News says marked “a new era” for the grocery business — or the fact that Amazon hopes to launch a second new grocery chain in 2019, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, with a potential plan to scale quickly by buying up floundering supermarkets. Even in plush times, grocery is a classic “red ocean” industry, highly undifferentiated and intensely competitive. (The term summons the image of a sea stained with the gore of countless skirmishes.) Now, the industry’s stodgy old playbook — “buy one, get one” sales, coupons in the weekly circular — is hurtling toward obsolescence. And with new ways to sell food ascendant, legacy grocers like Rich Niemann are failing to bring back the customers they once took for granted. You no longer need grocery stores to buy groceries.

Niemann hired Kelley in the context of this imminent doom. The assignment: to conceive, design, and build the grocery store of the future. Niemann was ready to entertain any idea and invest heavily. And for Kelley, a man who’s worked for decades honing his vision for what the grocery store should do and be, it was the opportunity of a lifetime — carte blanche to build the working model he’s long envisioned, one he believes can save the neighborhood supermarket from obscurity.

Kevin Kelley, illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

Rich Niemann, illustration by Vinnie Neuberg

The store that resulted is called Harvest Market, which opened in 2016. It’s south of downtown Champaign, Illinois, out by the car dealerships and strip malls; 58,000 square feet of floor space mostly housed inside a huge, high-ceilinged glass barn. Its bulk calls to mind both the arch of a hayloft and the heavenward jut of a church. But you could also say it’s shaped like an ark, because it’s meant to survive an apocalypse.

Harvest Market is the anti-Amazon. It’s designed to excel at what e-commerce can’t do: convene people over the mouth-watering appeal of prize ingredients and freshly prepared food. The proportion of groceries sold online is expected to swell over the next five or six years, but Harvest is a bet that behavioral psychology, spatial design, and narrative panache can get people excited about supermarkets again. Kelley isn’t asking grocers to be more like Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton. He’s not asking them to be ruthless, race-to-the-bottom merchants. In fact, he thinks that grocery stores can be something far greater than we ever imagined — a place where farmers and their urban customers can meet, a crucial link between the city and the country.

But first, if they’re going to survive, Kelley says, grocers need to start thinking like Alfred Hitchcock.

* * *

Kevin Kelley is an athletic-looking man in his mid-50s , with a piercing hazel gaze that radiates thoughtful intensity. In the morning, he often bikes two miles to Shook Kelley’s office in Hollywood — a rehabbed former film production studio on an unremarkable stretch of Melrose Avenue, nestled between Bogie’s Liquors and a driving school. Four nights a week, he visits a boxing gym to practice Muay Thai, a form of martial arts sometimes called “the art of eight limbs” for the way it combines fist, elbow, knee, and shin attacks. “Martial arts,” Kelley tells me, “are a framework for handling the unexpected.” That’s not so different from his main mission in life: He helps grocery stores develop frameworks for the unexpected, too.

You’ve never heard of him, but then it’s his job to be invisible. Kelley calls himself a supermarket ghostwriter: His contributions are felt more than seen, and the brands that hire him get all the credit. Countless Americans have interacted with his work in intimate ways, but will never know his name. Such is the thankless lot of the supermarket architect.

A film buff equally fascinated by advertising and the psychology of religion, Kelley has radical theories about how grocery stores should be built, theories that involve terms like “emotional opportunity,” “brain activity,” “climax,” and “mise-en-scène.” But before he can talk to grocers about those concepts, he has to convince them of something far more elemental: that their businesses face near-certain annihilation and must change fundamentally to avoid going extinct.

“It is the most daunting feeling when you go to a grocery store chain, and you meet with these starched-white-shirt executives,” Kelley tells me. “When we get a new job, we sit around this table — we do it twenty, thirty times a year. Old men, generally. Don’t love food, progressive food. Just love their old food — like Archie Bunkers, essentially. You meet these people and then you tour their stores. Then I’ve got to go convince Archie Bunker that there’s something called emotions, that there are these ideas about branding and feeling. It is a crazy assignment. I can’t get them to forget that they’re no longer in a situation where they’ve got plenty of customers. That it’s do-or-die time now.”

Forget branding. Forget sales. Kelley’s main challenge is redirecting the attention of older male executives, scared of the future and yet stuck in their ways, to the things that really matter.

“I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions,” he says.

Human beings, it turns out, aren’t very good at avoiding large-scale disaster. As you read this, the climate is changing, thanks to the destructively planet-altering activities of our species. The past four years have been the hottest on record. If the trend continues — and virtually all experts agree it will — we’re likely to experience mass disruptions on a scale never before seen in human history. Drought will be epidemic. The ocean will acidify. Islands will be swallowed by the sea. People could be displaced by the millions, creating a new generation of climate refugees. And all because we didn’t move quickly enough when we still had time.

You know this already. But I bet you’re not doing much about it — not enough, at least, to help avert catastrophe. I’ll bet your approach looks a lot like mine: worry too much, accomplish too little. The sheer size of the problem is paralyzing. Vast, systemic challenges tend to short-circuit our primate brains. So we go on, as the grim future bears down.

Grocers, in their own workaday way, fall prey to the same inertia. They got used to an environment of relative stability. They don’t know how to prepare for an uncertain future. And they can’t force themselves to behave as if the good times are really going to go away — even if, deep down, they know it’s true.

I make my living convincing male skeptics of the power of emotions.

In the 1980s, you could still visit almost any community in the U.S. and find a thriving supermarket. Typically, it would be a dynasty family grocery store, one that had been in business for a few generations. Larger markets usually had two or three players, small chains that sorted themselves out along socioeconomic lines: fancy, middlebrow, thrifty. Competition was slack and demand — this is the beautiful thing about selling food — never waned. For decades, times were good in the grocery business. Roads and schools were named after local supermarket moguls, who often chaired their local chambers of commerce. “When you have that much demand, and not much competition, nothing gets tested. Kind of like a country with a military that really doesn’t know whether their bullets work,” Kelley says. “They’d never really been in a dogfight.”

It’s hard to believe now, but there was not a single Walmart on the West Coast until 1990. That decade saw the birth of the “hypermarket” and the beginning of the end for traditional grocery stores — Walmarts, Costcos, and Kmarts became the first aggressive competition supermarkets ever really faced, luring customers in with the promise of one-stop shopping on everything from Discmen to watermelon.

The other bright red flag: Americans started cooking at home less and eating out more. In 2010, Americans dined out more than in for the first time on record, the culmination of a slow shift away from home cooking that had been going on since at least the 1960s. That trend is likely to continue. According to a 2017 report from the USDA’s Economic Research Service, millennials shop at food stores less than any other age group, spend less time preparing food, and are more likely to eat carry-out, delivery, or fast food even when they do eat at home. But even within the shrinking market for groceries, competition has stiffened. Retailers not known for selling food increasingly specialize in it, a phenomenon called “channel blurring”; today, pharmacies like CVS sell pantry staples and packaged foods, while 99-cent stores like Dollar General are a primary source of groceries for a growing number of Americans. Then there’s e-commerce. Though only about 3 percent of groceries are currently bought online, that figure could rocket to 20 percent by 2025. From subscription meal-kit services like Blue Apron to online markets like FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh, shopping for food has become an increasingly digital endeavor — one that sidesteps traditional grocery stores entirely.

A cursory glance might suggest grocery stores are in no immediate danger. According to the data analytics company Inmar, traditional supermarkets still have a 44.6 percent market share among brick-and-mortar food retailers. And though a spate of bankruptcies has recently hit the news, there are actually more grocery stores today than there were in 2005. Compared to many industries — internet service, for example — the grocery industry is still a diverse, highly varied ecosystem. Forty-three percent of grocery companies have fewer than four stores, according to a recent USDA report. These independent stores sold 11 percent of the nation’s groceries in 2015, a larger collective market share than successful chains like Albertson’s (4.5 percent), Publix (2.25 percent), and Whole Foods (1.2 percent).

But looking at this snapshot without context is misleading — a little like saying that the earth can’t be warming because it’s snowing outside. Not long ago, grocery stores sold the vast majority of the food that was prepared and eaten at home — about 90 percent in 1988, according to Inmar. Today, their market share has fallen by more than half, even as groceries represent a diminished proportion of overall food sold. Their slice of the pie is steadily shrinking, as is the pie itself.

By 2025, the thinking goes, most Americans will rarely enter a grocery store. That’s according to a report called “Surviving the Brave New World of Food Retailing,” published by the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council — a think tank sponsored by the soft drink giant to help retailers prepare for major changes. The report describes a retail marketplace in the throes of massive change, where supermarkets as we know them are functionally obsolete. Disposables and nonperishables, from paper towels to laundry detergent and peanut butter, will replenish themselves automatically, thanks to smart-home sensors that reorder when supplies are low. Online recipes from publishers like Epicurious will sync directly to digital shopping carts operated by e-retailers like Amazon. Impulse buys and last-minute errands will be fulfilled via Instacart and whisked over in self-driving Ubers. In other words, food — for the most part — will be controlled by a small handful of powerful tech companies.

The Coca-Cola report, written in consultation with a handful of influential grocery executives, including Rich Niemann, acknowledges that the challenges are dire. To remain relevant, it concludes, supermarkets will need to become more like tech platforms: develop a “robust set of e-commerce capabilities,” take “a mobile-first approach,” and leverage “enhanced digital assets.” They’ll need infrastructure for “click and collect” purchasing, allowing customers to order online and pick up in a jiffy. They’ll want to establish a social media presence, as well as a “chatbot strategy.” In short, they’ll need to become Amazon, and they’ll need to do it all while competing with Walmart — and its e-commerce platform, Jet.com — on convenience and price.

That’s why Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market was terrifying to so many grocers, sending the stocks of national chains like Kroger tumbling: It represents a future they can’t really compete in. Since August 2017, Amazon has masterfully integrated e-commerce and physical shopping, creating a muscular hybrid that represents an existential threat to traditional grocery stores. The acquisition was partially a real estate play: Whole Foods stores with Prime lockers now act as a convenient pickup depot for Amazon goods. But Amazon’s also doing its best to make it too expensive and inconvenient for its Prime members, who pay $129 a year for free two-day shipping and a host of other perks, to shop anywhere else. Prime members receive additional 10 percent discounts on select goods at Whole Foods, and Amazon is rolling out home grocery delivery in select areas. With the Whole Foods acquisition, then, Amazon cornered two markets: the thrift-driven world of e-commerce and the pleasure-seeking universe of high-end grocery. Order dish soap and paper towels in bulk on Amazon, and pick them up at Whole Foods with your grass-fed steak.

Traditional grocers are now expected to offer the same combination of convenience, flexibility, selection, and value. They’re understandably terrified by this scenario, which would require fundamental, complex, and very expensive changes. And Kelley is terrified of it, too, though for a different reason: He simply thinks it won’t work. In his view, supermarkets will never beat Walmart and Amazon at what they do best. If they try to succeed by that strategy alone, they’ll fail. That prospect keeps Kelley up at night — because it could mean a highly consolidated marketplace overseen by just a handful of players, one at stark contrast to the regional, highly varied food retail landscape America enjoyed throughout the 20th century.

“I’m afraid of what could happen if Walmart and Amazon and Lidl are running our food system, the players trying to get everything down to the lowest price possible,” he tells me. “What gives me hope is the upstarts who will do the opposite. Who aren’t going to sell convenience or efficiency, but fidelity.”

The approach Kelley’s suggesting still means completely overhauling everything, with no guarantee of success. It’s a strategy that’s decidedly low-tech, though it’s no less radical. It’s more about people than new platforms. It means making grocery shopping more like going to the movies.

* * *

Nobody grows up daydreaming about designing grocery stores, including Kelley. As a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he was just like every other architect-in-training: He wanted to be a figure like Frank Gehry, building celebrated skyscrapers and cultural centers. But he came to feel dissatisfied with the culture of his profession. In his view, architects coldly fixate on the aesthetics of buildings and aren’t concerned enough with the people inside.

“Architecture worships objects, and Capital-A architects are object makers,” Kelley tells me. “They aren’t trying to fix social issues. People and their experience and their perceptions and behaviors don’t matter to them. They don’t even really want people in their photographs—or if they have to, they’ll blur them out.” What interested Kelley most was how people would use his buildings, not how the structures would fit into the skyline. He wanted to shape spaces in ways that could actually affect our emotions and personalities, bringing out the better angels of our nature. To his surprise, no one had really quantified a set of rules for how environment could influence behavior. Wasn’t it strange that advertising agencies spent so much time thinking about the links between storytelling, emotions, and decision-making — while commercial spaces, the places where we actually go to buy, often had no design principle beyond brute utility?

“My ultimate goal was to create a truly multidisciplinary firm that was comprised of designers, social scientists and marketing types,” he says. “It was so unorthodox and so bizarrely new in terms of approach that everyone thought I was crazy.”

In 1992, when he was 28, Kelley cofounded Shook Kelley with the Charlotte, North Carolina–based architect and urban planner Terry Shook. Their idea was to offer a suite of services that bridged social science, branding, and design, a new field they called “perception management.” They were convinced space could be used to manage emotion, just the way cinema leads us through a guided sequence of feelings, and wanted to turn that abstract idea into actionable principles. While Shook focused on bigger, community-oriented spaces like downtown centers and malls, Kelley focused on the smaller, everyday commercial spaces overlooked by fancy architecture firms: dry cleaners, convenience stores, eateries, bars. One avant-garde restaurant Kelley designed in Charlotte, called Props, was an homage to the sitcom craze of the 1990s. It was built to look like a series of living rooms, based on the apartment scenes in shows like Seinfeld and Friends and featured couches and easy chairs instead of dining tables to encourage guests to mingle during dinner.

The shift to grocery stores didn’t happen until a few years later, almost by accident. In the mid-’90s, Americans still spent about 55 percent of their food dollars on meals eaten at home — but that share was declining quickly enough to concern top corporate brass at Harris Teeter, a Charlotte-area, North Carolina–based grocery chain with stores throughout the Southwestern United States. (Today, Harris Teeter is owned by Kroger, the country’s second-largest seller of groceries behind Walmart.) Harris Teeter execs reached out to Shook Kelley. “We hear you’re good with design, and you’re good with food,” Kelley remembers Harris Teeter reps saying. “Maybe you could help us.”

At first, it was Terry Shook’s account. He rebuilt each section of the store into a distinct “scene” that reinforced the themes and aesthetics of the type of food it sold. The deli counter became a mocked-up urban delicatessen, complete with awning and neon sign. The produce section resembled a roadside farmstand. The dairy cases were corrugated steel silos, emblazoned with the logo of a local milk supplier. And he introduced full-service cafés, a novelty for grocery stores at the time, with chrome siding like a vintage diner. It was pioneering work, winning that year’s Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Interior Design Association — according to Kelley, it was the first time the prestigious award had ever been given to a grocery store.

Shook backed off of grocery stores after launching the new Harris Teeter, but the experience sparked Kelley’s lifelong fascination with grocery stores, which he realized were ideal proving grounds for his ideas about design and behavior. Supermarkets contain thousands of products, and consumers make dozens of decisions inside them — decisions about health, safety, family, and tradition that get to the core of who they are. He largely took over the Harris Teeter account and redesigned nearly 100 of the chain’s stores, work that would go on to influence the way the industry saw itself and ultimately change the way stores are built and navigated.

Since then, Kelley has worked to show grocery stores that they don’t have to worship at the altar of supply-side economics. He urges grocers to appeal instead to our humanity. Kelley asks them to think more imaginatively about their stores, using physical space to evoke nostalgia, delight our senses, and appeal to the parts of us motivated by something bigger and more generous than plain old thrift. Shopping, for him, is all about navigating our personal hopes and fears, and grocery stores will only succeed when they play to those emotions.

When it works, the results are dramatic. Between 2003 and 2007, Whole Foods hired Shook Kelley for brand strategy and store design, working with the firm throughout a crucial period of the chain’s development. The fear was that as Whole Foods grew, its image would become too diffuse, harder to differentiate from other health food stores; at the same time, the company wanted to attract more mainstream shoppers. Kelley’s team was tasked with finding new ways to telegraph the brand’s singular value. Their solution was a hierarchical system of signage that would streamline the store’s crowded field of competing health and wellness claims.

Kelley’s view is that most grocery stores are “addicted” to signage, cramming their spaces with so many pricing details, promotions, navigational signs, ads, and brand assets that it “functionally shuts down [the customer’s] ability to digest the information in front of them.”

Kelley’s team stipulated that Whole Foods could only have seven layers of information, which ranged from evocative signage 60 feet away to descriptive displays six feet from customers to promotional info just six inches from their hands. Everything else was “noise,” and jettisoned from the stores entirely. If you’ve ever shopped at Whole Foods, you probably recognize the way that the store’s particular brand of feel-good, hippie sanctimony seems to permeate your consciousness at every turn. Kelley helped invent that. The system he created for pilot stores in Princeton, New Jersey, and Louisville, Kentucky, were scaled throughout the chain and are still in use today, he says. (Whole Foods did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

With a carefully delineated set of core values guiding its purchasing and brand, Whole Foods was ripe for the kind of visual overhaul Kelley specializes in. But most regional grocery chains have a different set of problems: They don’t really have values to telegraph in the first place. Shook Kelley’s approach is about getting buttoned-down grocers to reflect on their beliefs, tapping into deeper, more primal reasons for wanting to sell food.

* * *

Today, Kelley and his team have developed a playbook for clients, a finely tuned process to get shoppers to think in terms that go beyond bargain-hunting. It embraces what he calls “the theater of retail” and draws inspiration from an unlikely place: the emotionally laden visual language of cinema. His goal is to convince grocers to stop thinking like Willy Loman — like depressed, dejected salesmen forever peddling broken-down goods, fixated on the past and losing touch with the present. In order to survive, Kelley says, grocers can’t be satisfied with providing a place to complete a chore. They’ll need to direct an experience.

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Today’s successful retail brands establish what Kelley calls a “brand realm,” or what screenwriters would call a story’s “setting.” We don’t usually think consciously about them, but realms subtly shape our attitude toward shopping the same way the foggy, noirishly lit streets in a Batman movie tell us something about Gotham City. Cracker Barrel is set in a nostalgic rural house. Urban Outfitters is set on a graffitied urban street. Tommy Bahama takes place on a resort island. It’s a well-known industry secret that Costco stores are hugely expensive to construct — they’re designed to resemble fantasy versions of real-life warehouses, and the appearance of thrift doesn’t come cheap. Some realms are even more specific and fanciful: Anthropologie is an enchanted attic, complete with enticing cupboards and drawers. Trader Joe’s is a crew of carefree, hippie traders shipping bulk goods across the sea. A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.

Kelley takes this a few steps further. The Shook Kelly team, which includes a cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D., begins by conducting interviews with executives, staff, and locals, looking for the storytelling hooks they call “emotional opportunities.” These can stem from core brand values, but often revolve around the most intense, place-specific feelings locals have about food. Then Kelley finds ways to place emotional opportunities inside a larger realm with an overarching narrative, helping retailers tell those stories — not with shelves of product, but through a series of affecting “scenes.”

In Alberta, Canada, Shook Kelley redesigned a small, regional grocery chain now called Freson Bros. Fresh Market. In interviews, the team discovered that meat-smoking is a beloved pastime there, so Shook Kelley built huge, in-store smokers at each new location — a scene called “Banj’s Smokehouse” — that crank out pound after pound of the province’s signature beef, as well as elk, deer, and other kinds of meat (customers can even BYO meat to be smoked in-house). Kelley also designed stylized root cellars in each produce section, a cooler, darker corner of each store that nods to the technique Albertans use to keep vegetables fresh. These elements aren’t just novel ways to taste, touch, and buy. They reference cultural set points, triggering memories and personal associations. Kelley uses these open, aisle-less spaces, which he calls “perceptual rooms,” to draw customers through an implied sequence of actions, tempting them towards a specific purchase.

Something magical happens when you engage customers this way. Behavior changes in visible, quantifiable ways. People move differently. They browse differently. And they buy differently. Rather than progressing in a linear fashion, the way a harried customer might shoot down an aisle — Kelley hates aisles, which he says encourage rushed, menial shopping — customers zig-zag, meander, revisit. These behaviors are a sign a customer is “experimenting,” engaging with curiosity and pleasure rather than just trying to complete a task. “If I was doing a case study presentation to you, I would show you exact conditions where we don’t change the product, the price, the service. We just change the environment and we’ll change the behavior,” Kelley tells me. “That always shocks retailers. They’re like ‘Holy cow.’ They don’t realize how much environment really affects behavior.”

A strong sense of place helps immerse us in a store, getting us emotionally invested and (perhaps) ready to suspend the critical faculties that prevent a shopping spree.

In the mid-2000s, Nabisco approached Kelley’s firm, complaining that sales were down 16 percent in the cookie-and-cracker aisle. In response, Shook Kelley designed “Mom’s Kitchen,” which was piloted at Buehler’s, a 15-store chain in northern Ohio. Kelley took Nabisco’s products out of the center aisles entirely and installed them in a self-contained zone: a perceptual room built out to look like a nostalgic vision of suburban childhood, all wooden countertops, tile, and hanging copper pans. Shelves of Nabisco products from Ritz Crackers to Oreos lined the walls. Miniature packs of Animal Crackers waited out in a large bowl, drawers opened to reveal boxes of Saltines. The finishing touch had nothing to do with Nabisco and everything to do with childhood associations: Kelley had the retailers install fridge cases filled with milk, backlit and glowing. Who wants to eat Oreos without a refreshing glass of milk to wash them down?

The store operators weren’t sold. They found it confusing and inconvenient to stock milk in two places at once. But from a sales perspective, the experiment was a smash. Sales of Nabisco products increased by as much as 32 percent, and the entire cookie-and-cracker segment experienced a halo effect, seeing double-digit jumps. Then, the unthinkable: The stores started selling out of milk. They simply couldn’t keep it on the shelves.

You’d think that the grocery stores would be thrilled, that it would have them scrambling to knock over their aisles of goods, building suites of perceptual rooms. Instead, they retreated. Nabisco’s parent company at the time, Kraft, was excited by the results and kicked the idea over to a higher-up corporate division where it stalled. And Buehler’s, for its part, never did anything to capitalize on its success. When the Nabisco took “Mom’s Kitchen” displays down, Kelley says, the stores didn’t replace them.

Mom’s Kitchen, fully stocked. (Photo by Tim Buchman)

“We were always asking a different question: What is the problem you’re trying to solve through food?” Kelley says. “It’s not just a refueling exercise — instead, what is the social, emotional issue that food is solving for us? We started trying to work that into grocery. But we probably did it a little too early, because they weren’t afraid enough.”

Since then, Kelley has continued to build his case to unreceptive audiences of male executives with mixed success. He tells them that when customers experiment — when the process of sampling, engaging, interacting, and evaluating an array of options becomes a source of pleasure — they tend to take more time shopping. And that the more time customers spend in-store, the more they buy. In the industry, this all-important metric is called “dwell time.” Most retail experts agree that increasing dwell without increasing frustration (say, with long checkout times) will be key to the survival of brick-and-mortar retail. Estimates vary on how much dwell time increases sales; according to Davinder Jheeta, creative brand director of the British supermarket Simply Fresh, customers spent 1.3 percent more for every 1 percent increase in dwell time in 2015.

Another way to increase dwell time? Offer prepared foods. Delis, cafes, and in-store restaurants increase dwell time and facilitate pleasure while operating with much higher profit margins and recapturing some of the dining-out dollar that grocers are now losing. “I tell my clients, ‘In five years, you’re going to be in the restaurant business,” Kelley says, “‘or you’re going to be out of business.’”

Kelley’s job, then, is to use design in ways that get customers to linger, touch, taste, scrutinize, explore. The stakes are high, but the ambitions are startlingly low. Kelley often asks clients what he calls a provocative question: Rather than trying to bring in new customers, would it solve their problems if 20 percent of customers increased their basket size by just two dollars? The answer, he says, is typically an enthusiastic yes.

Just two more dollars per trip for every fifth customer — that’s what victory looks like. And failure? That looks like a food marketplace dominated by Walmart and Amazon, a world where the neighborhood supermarket is a thing of the past.

* * *

When Shook Kelley started working on Niemann’s account, things began the way they always did: looking for emotional opportunities. But the team was stumped. Niemann’s stores were clean and expertly run. There was nothing wrong with them. Niemann’s problem was that he had no obvious problem. There was no there there.

Many of the regionals Kelley works with have no obvious emotional hook; all they know is that they’ve sold groceries for a long time and would like to keep on selling them. When he asks clients what they believe in, they show him grainy black-and-white photos of the stores their parents and grandparents ran, but they can articulate little beyond the universal goal of self-perpetuation. So part of Shook Kelley’s specialty is locating the distinguishing spark in brands that do nothing especially well, which isn’t always easy. At Buehler’s Fresh Foods, the chain where “Mom’s Kitchen” was piloted, the store’s Shook Kelley–supplied emotional theme is “Harnessing the Power of Nice.”

Still, Niemann Foods was an especially challenging case. “We were like, ‘Is there any core asset here?’” Kelley told me. “And we were like, ‘No. You really don’t have anything.’”

What Kelley noticed most was how depressed Niemann seemed, how gloomy about the fate of grocery stores in general. Nothing excited him — with one exception. Niemann runs a cattle ranch, a family operation in northeast Missouri. “Whenever he talked about cattle and feed and antibiotics and meat qualities, his physical body would change. We’re like, ‘My god. This guy loves ranching.’ He only had three hundred cattle or something, but he had a thousand pounds of interest in it.”

Niemann’s farm now has about 600 cattle, though it’s still more hobby farm than full-time gig — but it ended up being a revelation. During an early phase of the process, someone brought up “So God Made a Farmer” — a speech radio host Paul Harvey gave at the 1978 Future Farmers of America Convention that had been used in an ad for Ram trucks in the previous year’s Super Bowl. It’s a short poem that imagines the eighth day of the biblical creation, where God looks down from paradise and realizes his new world needs a caretaker. What kind of credentials is God looking for? Someone “willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.” God needs “somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next year.’” God needs “somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to yean lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark.” In other words, God needs a farmer.

Part denim psalm, part Whitmanesque catalogue, it’s a quintessential piece of Americana — hokey and humbling like a Norman Rockwell painting, and a bit behind the times (of course, the archetypal farmer is male). And when Kelley’s team played the crackling audio over the speakers in a conference room in Quincy, Illinois, something completely unexpected happened. Something that convinced Kelley that his client’s stores had an emotional core after all, one strong enough to provide the thematic backbone for a new approach to the grocery store.

Rich Niemann, the jaded supermarket elder statesman, broke down and wept.

* * *

I have never been a fan of shopping. Spending money stresses me out. I worry too much to enjoy it. So I wanted to see if a Kelley store could really be what he said it was, a meaningful experience, or if it would just feel fake and hokey. You know, like the movies. When I asked if there was one store I could visit to see his full design principles in action, he told me to go to Harvest, “the most interesting store in America.”

Champaign is two hours south of O’Hare by car. Crossing its vast landscape of unrelenting farmland, you appreciate the sheer scale of Illinois, how far the state’s lower half is from Chicago. It’s a college town, which comes with the usual trappings — progressive politics, cafes and bars, young people lugging backpacks with their earbuds in — but you forget that fast outside the city limits. In 2016, some townships in Champaign county voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 50 points.

I was greeted in the parking lot by Gerry Kettler, Niemann Foods’ director of consumer affairs. Vintage John Deere tractors formed a caravan outside the store. The shopping cart vestibules were adorned with images of huge combines roving across fields of commodity crops. Outside the wide-mouthed entryway, local produce waited in picket-fence crates — in-season tomatoes from Johnstonville, sweet onions from Warrensburg.

And then we stepped inside.

Everywhere, sunlight poured in through the tall, glass facade, illuminating a sequence of discrete, airy, and largely aisle-less zones. Kettler bounded around the store, pointing out displays with surprised joy on his face, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. The flowers by the door come from local growers like Delight Flower Farm and Illinois Willows. “Can’t keep this shit in stock,” he said. He makes me hold an enormous jackfruit to admire its heft. The produce was beautiful, he was right, with more local options than I’ve ever seen in a grocery store. The Warrensville sweet corn is eye-poppingly cheap: two bucks a dozen. There were purple broccolini and clamshells filled with squash blossoms, a delicacy so temperamental that they’re rarely sold outside of farmers’ markets. Early on, they had to explain to some teenage cashiers what they were — they’d never seen squash blossoms before.

I started to sense the “realm” Harvest inhabits: a distinctly red-state brand of America, local food for fans of faith and the free market. It’s hunting gear. It’s Chevys. It’s people for whom commercial-scale pig barns bring back memories of home. Everywhere, Shook Kelley signage — a hierarchy of cues like what Kelley dreamed up for Whole Foods — drives the message home. A large, evocative sign on the far wall reads Pure Farm Flavor, buttressed by the silhouettes of livestock, so large it almost feels subliminal. Folksy slogans hang on the walls, sayings like FULL OF THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS and THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP.

Then there are the informational placards that point out suppliers and methods.

There are at least a half dozen varieties of small-batch honey; you can find pastured eggs for $3.69. The liquor section includes local selections, like whiskey distilled in DeKalb and a display with cutting boards made from local wood by Niemann Foods’ HR Manager. “Turns out we had some talent in our backyard,” Kettler said. Niemann’s willingness to look right under his nose, sidestepping middlemen distributors to offer reasonably priced, local goods, is a hallmark of Harvest Market.

That shortened chain of custody is only possible because of Niemann and the lifetime of supply-side know-how he brings to table. But finding ways to offer better, more affordable food has been a long-term goal of Kelley — who strained his relationship with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey over the issue. As obsessed as Kelley is with appearances, he insists to me that his work must be grounded in something “real”: that grocery stores only succeed when they really try to make the world a better place through food. In his view, Whole Foods wasn’t doing enough to address its notoriously high prices — opening itself up to be undercut by cheaper competition, and missing a kind of ethical opportunity to make better food available to more people.

“When,” Kelley remembers asking, “did you start to mistake opulence for success?”

In Kelley’s telling, demand slackened so much during the Great Recession that it nearly lead to Whole Foods’ downfall, a financial setback that the company never fully recovered from — and, one could argue, ultimately led to its acquisition. Harvest Market, for its part, has none of Whole Foods’ clean-label sanctimony. It takes an “all-of-the-above” approach: There’s local produce, but there’re also Oreos and Doritos and Coca-Cola; at Thanksgiving, you can buy a pastured turkey from Triple S Farms or a 20-pound Butterball. But that strong emphasis on making local food more accessible and affordable makes it an interesting counterpart to Kelley’s former client.

The most Willy Wonka–esque touch is the hulking piece of dairy processing equipment in a glass room by the cheese case. It’s a commercial-scale butter churner — the first one ever, Kettler told me, to grace the inside of a grocery store.

“So this was a Shook Kelley idea,” he said, “We said yes, without knowing how much it would cost. And the costs just kept accelerating. But we’re thrilled. People love it.”Harvest Market isn’t just a grocery store — it’s also a federally inspected dairy plant. The store buys sweet cream from a local dairy, which it churns into house-made butter, available for purchase by the brick and used throughout Harvest’s bakery and restaurant. The butter sells out as fast as they can make it. Unlike the grocers who objected to “Mom’s Kitchen,” the staff don’t seem to mind.

As I walked through the store, I couldn’t help wondering how impressed I really was. I found Harvest to be a beautiful example of a grocery store, no doubt, and a very unusual one. What was it that made me want to encounter something more outrageous, more radical, more theatrical and bizarre? I wanted animatronic puppets. I wanted fog machines.

I should have known better — Kelley had warned me that you can’t take the theater of retail too far without breaking the dream. He’d told me that he admires stores where “you’re just not even aware of the wonder of the scene, you’re just totally engrossed in it” — stores a universe away from the overwrought, hokey feel of Disneyland. But I had Amazon’s new stores in the back up my mind as a counterpoint, with all their cashierless bells and whistles, their ability to click and collect, their ability to test-drive Alexa and play a song or switch on a fan. I guess, deep down, I was wondering if something this subtle really could work.

“Here, this is Rich Niemann,” Kettler said, and I found myself face-to-face with Niemann himself. We shook hands and he asked if I’d ever been to Illinois before. Many times, I told him. My wife is from Chicago, so we’ve visited the city often.

He grinned at me.

“That’s not Illinois,” he said.

We walked to Harvest’s restaurant, a 40-person seating area plus an adjacent bar with a row of stools, that offers standards like burgers, salads, and flatbreads. There’s an additional 80-person seating area on the second-floor mezzanine, a simulated living room complete with couches and board games. Beyond that, they pointed out the brand-new wine bar — open, like the rest of the space, until midnight. There’s a cooking classroom by the corporate offices. Through the window, I saw a classroom full of children doing something to vegetables. Adult Cooking classes run two or three nights every week, plus special events for schools and other groups.

For a summer weekday at noon in a grocery store I’m amazed how many people are eating and working on laptops. One guy has his machine hooked up to a full-sized monitor he lugged up the stairs — he’s made a customized wooden piece that hooks into Harvest’s wrought-iron support beams to create a platform for his plus-size screen. He comes every day, like it’s his office. He’s a dwell-time dream.

We sit down, and Kettler insists I eat the corn first, slathering it with the house-made butter and eating it while it’s hot. He reminds me that it’s grown by the Maddoxes, a family in Warrensburg, about 50 miles west of Champaign.

The corn was good, but I wanted to ask Niemann if the grocery industry was really that bad, and he told me it is. I assume he’ll want to talk about Amazon and its acquisition of Whole Foods and the way e-commerce has changed the game. He acknowledges that, but to my surprise he said the biggest factor is something else entirely — a massive shift happening in the world of consumer packaged goods, or CPGs.

For years, grocery stores never had to advertise, because the largest companies in the world — Proctor and Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle — did their advertising for them, just the way Nabisco helped finance “Mom’s Kitchen” to benefit the stores. People came to supermarkets to buy the foods they saw on TV. But Americans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They’re looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg’s and General Mills don’t have the pull they once had.

When their sales flag, grocery sales do too — and the once-bulletproof alliance between food brands and supermarkets is splitting. For the past two years, the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association, an influential trade group representing the biggest food companies in the world, started to lose members. It began with Campbell’s Soup. Dean Foods, Mars, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Hershey Company, the Kraft Heinz Company, and others followed. That profound betrayal was a rude awakening: CPG companies don’t need grocery stores. They have Amazon. They can sell directly through their websites. They can launch their own pop-ups.

It’s only then that I realized how dire the predicament of grocery stores really is, and why Niemann was so frustrated when he first called Kevin Kelley. It’s one thing when you can’t sell as cheaply and conveniently as your competitors. But it’s another thing when no one wants what you’re selling.

Harvest doesn’t feel obviously futuristic in the way an Amazon store might. If I went there as a regular shopper and not as a journalist sniffing around for a story, I’m sure I’d find it to be a lovely and transporting way to buy food. But what’s going on behind the scenes is, frankly, unheard of.

Grocery stores have two ironclad rules. First, that grocers set the prices, and farmers do what they can within those mandates. And second, that everyone works with distributors who oversee the aggregation and transport of all goods. Harvest has traditional relationships with companies like Coca-Cola, but it breaks those rules with local farmers and foodmakers. Suppliers — from the locally milled wheat to the local produce to the Kilgus Farms sweet cream that goes into the churner — truck their products right to the back. By avoiding middlemen and their surcharges, Harvest is able to pay suppliers more directly and charge customers less. And it keeps costs low. You can still find $4.29 pints of Halo Top ice cream in the freezer, but the produce section features stunning bargains. When the Maddox family pulls up with its latest shipment of corn, people sometimes start buying it off the back of the truck in the parking lot. That’s massive change, and it’s virtually unheard of in supermarkets. At the same time, suppliers get to set their own prices. Niemann’s suppliers tell him what they need to charge; Niemann adds a standard margin and lets customers decide if they’re willing to pay.

If there’s a reason Harvest matters, it’s only partly because of the aesthetics. It’s mainly because the model of what a grocery store is has been tossed out and rebuilt. And why not? The world as Rich Niemann knows it is ending.

* * *

In 2017, just months after Harvest Market’s opening, Niemann won the Thomas K. Zaucha Entrepreneurial Excellence Award — the National Grocers Association’s top honor, given for “persistence, vision, and creative entrepreneurship.” That spring, Harvest was spotlighted in a “Store of the Month” cover feature in the influential trade magazine Progressive Grocer. Characteristically, the contributions of Kelley and his firm were not mentioned in the piece.

Niemann tells me his company is currently planning to open a second Harvest Market in Springfield, Illinois, about 90 minutes west of Champaign, in 2020. Without sharing specifics about profitability or sales numbers, he says the store was everything he’d hoped it would be as far as the metrics that most matter — year-over-year sales growth and customer engagement. His only complaint about the store, has to do with parking. For years, Niemann has relied on the same golden ratio to determine the size of parking lot needed for his stores — a certain number of spots for every thousand dollars of expected sales. Harvest’s lot uses the same logic, and it’s nowhere near enough space.

“In any grocery store, the customer’s first objective is pantry fill — to take care of my needs as best I can on my budget,” Niemann says. “But we created a different atmosphere. These customers want to talk. They want to know. They want to experience. They want to taste. They’re there because it’s an adventure.”

They stay so much longer than expected that the parking lot sometimes struggles to fit all their cars at once. Unlike the Amazon stores that may soon be cropping up in a neighborhood near you — reportedly, the company is considering plans to open 3,000 of them in by 2021 — it’s not about getting in and out quickly without interacting with another human being. At Harvest, you stay awhile. And that’s the point.

But Americans are falling out of love with legacy brands. They’re looking for something different, locality, a sense of novelty and adventure. Kellogg’s and General Mills don’t have the pull they once had.

So far, Harvest’s success hasn’t made it any easier for Kelley, who still struggles to persuade clients to make fundamental changes. They’re still as scared as they’ve always been, clinging to the same old ideas. He tells them that, above all else, they need to develop a food philosophy — a reason why they do this in the first place, something that goes beyond mere nostalgia or the need to make money. They need to build something that means something, a store people return to not just to complete a task but because it somehow sustains them. For some, that’s too tall an order. “They go, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ I’m like, ‘Then what are you going to do?’ And they literally tell me: ‘I’m going to retire.’” It’s easier to cash out. Pass the buck, and consign the fate of the world to younger people with bolder dreams.

Does it even matter? The world existed before supermarkets, and it won’t end if they vanish. And in the ongoing story of American food, the 20th-century grocery store is no great hero. A&P — the once titanic chain, now itself defunct — was a great mechanizer, undercutting the countless smaller, local businesses that used to populate the landscape. More generally, the supermarket made it easier for Americans to distance ourselves from what we eat, shrouding food production behind a veil and letting us convince ourselves that price and convenience matter above all else. We let ourselves be satisfied with the appearance of abundance — even if great stacks of unblemished fruit contribute to waste and spoilage, even if the array of brightly colored packages are all owned by the same handful of multinational corporations.

But whatever springs up to replace grocery stores will have consequences, too, and the truth is that brick-and-mortar is not going away any time soon — far from it. Instead, the most powerful retailers in the world have realized that physical spaces have advantages they want to capitalize on. It’s not just that stores in residential neighborhoods work well as distribution depots, ones that help facilitate the home delivery of packages. And it’s not just that we can’t always be home to pick up the shipments we ordered when they arrive, so stores remain useful. The world’s biggest brands are now beginning to realize what Kelley has long argued: Physical stores are a way to capture attention, to subject customers to an experience, to influence the way they feel and think. What could be more useful? And what are Amazon’s proposed cashierless stores, but an illustration of Kelley’s argument? They take a brand thesis, a set of core values — that shopping should be quick and easy and highly mechanized — and seduce us with it, letting us feel the sweep and power of that vision as we pass with our goods through the doors without paying, flushed with the thrill a thief feels.

This is where new troubles start. Only a few companies in the world will be able to compete at Amazon’s scale — the scale where building 3,000 futuristic convenience stores in three years may be a realistic proposition. Unlike in the golden age of grocery, where different family owned chains catered to different demographics, we’ll have only a handful of players. We’ll have companies that own the whole value chain, low to high. Amazon owns the e-commerce site where you can find almost anything in the world for the cheapest price. And for when you want to feel the heft of an heirloom tomato in your hand or sample some manchego before buying, there is Whole Foods. Online retail for thrift, in-person shopping for pleasure. Except one massive company now owns them both.

If this new landscape comes to dominate, we may find there are things we miss about the past. For all its problems, the grocery industry is at least decentralized, owned by no one dominant company and carved up into more players than you could ever count. It’s run by people who often live alongside the communities they serve and share their concerns. We might miss that competition, that community. They are small. They are nimble. They are independently, sometimes even cooperatively, owned. They employ people. And if they are scrappy, and ingenious, and willing to change, there’s no telling what they might do. It is not impossible that they could use their assets — financial resources, industry connections, prime real estate — to find new ways to supply what we all want most: to be happier, to be healthier, to feel more connected. To be better people. To do the right thing.

I want to believe that, anyway. That stores — at least in theory — could be about something bigger, and better than mere commerce. The way Harvest seems to want to be, with some success. But I wonder if that’s just a fantasy, too: the dream that we can buy and sell our way to a better world, that it will take no more than that.

Which one is right?

I guess it depends on how you feel about the movies.

Maybe a film is just a diversion, a way to feel briefly better about our lives, the limitations and disappointments that define us, the things we cannot change. Most of us leave the theater, after all, and just go on being ourselves.

Still, maybe something else is possible. Maybe in the moment when the music swells, and our hearts beat faster, and we feel overcome by the beauty of an image — in the instant that we feel newly brave and noble, and ready to be different, braver versions of ourselves — that we are who we really are.

* * *

Joe Fassler,The New Food Economy’s deputy editor, has covered the intersection of food, policy, technology, and culture for the magazine since 2015. His food reporting has twice been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He’s also editor of Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Creative Process (Penguin, 2017), a book based on “By Heart,” his ongoing series of literary conversations for The Atlantic.

Editor: Michelle Weber Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

#Longreads #Food #Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam #Joe Fassler

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