[hattmall]

This has been happening in the real world for far longer. It's basically the experience of many modern cities, or even worse suburbs.

Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save

So much of modern life has been comodified to optimize for things that aren't necessarily what's inline with the users interests and certainly don't do anything for cultural robustness.

[designerarvid]

Guessing by your examples that you are American. Maybe you are aware, or perhaps not, that in Europe many view your culture as the one that has taken this to its extreme. Some envy it, some don’t.

[spwa4]

Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake). Or is your point that Europe has a different supermarket chain per country? Malls have the same stores across countries ... but they differ, somewhat, if you move from one country to the next. And they're fake. Every company has 3-4 store brands these days so malls have 4-5 stores that look different, but aren't.

So ... what a difference that makes?

(I mean, I get that it does make a difference. Carrefour clearly takes some pride in their chocolate selection and aldi ... well it's an insult to any product to be sold at aldi. But culture in shopping in the EU? Where do you find that?)

[VileSquirrel]

> Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores? (and for real, not fake)

I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home: butcher, baker, shoes store, newspaper store, convenience store, barber. The town hosts a market once a week that sells more divers products, and many people do shop there. Some of the stores are owned and operated by descendants of those who owned them 60 years ago, all have their owner working in the store.

Maybe you won't consider that to be "large amounts of small stores" but that is somewhat the point: all my basic needs can be covered by a handful of small stores.

Granted that type of life and town has become less representative over time, but I heard the trend is now to go back to the countryside as people flee the big cities.

[spwa4]

I also live in a small European town and there is a convenience store and a hairdresser. Oh and restaurants. That's it. Doesn't matter if you go to neighboring towns, they're the same. One of the neighboring towns has a supermarket, an Aldi.

I am also old enough to remember what it looked like in 1985.

[regexorcist]

Sounds like a very small town? In general most places are filled with shops you can walk to. In southern Europe in particular it's almost overwhelming the amount of options you have.

[spwa4]

Depends what you mean by very small town. It's about 30k people. So are the neighboring towns.

The nearest bigger town (~120k I believe) is about 25km away. Not quite walking or biking distance, but a short drive.

[zbikowski]

I think that young USAmericans are deathly envious of a community like yours, myself included. I have nothing really novel to contribute here (in my view, North American urbanism, zoning regulation, the aforementioned globalism and, if you will allow me to briefly beat a dead horse, car-centric planning are to blame.)

I was playing Stardew Valley the other day and it hit me. For me, that type of close-knit community and simple living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real life.

[aboardRat4]

>For me, that type of close-knit community and simple living is merely fantasy, absolutely unattainable in real life.

The US had that too until about WW2. There were family-owned shops having history lasting since long before the Revolution.

[hattmall]

There's absolutely places like that in the US. I have multiple of those establishments, non-chain, minutes away. No newspaper store IDK about that, there's also McDonalds, CVS, Subway, but the independent restaurants and business outnumber chains easily. It's just not in a major metropolitan area.

[genewitch]

> I live in a small european town and all the followings are found less than 3 minutes away from my home

walking, cycling, or driving? For where i live, in the USA, all three net me no shops. I have to travel 3.5km round trip to get candy and a cold drink at a gas station, ~19km to get fresh vegetables and fruit at all, and sixty-four kilometers to get to a "real" grocer. those are all round trip distances (had to edit 11 to 19 because i just multiplied by three instead of 6, and corrected the distance, too; oops!)

I think we have a vastly different definition of "small town"!

Now, i grew up in Whittier, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles, and a city so big it's the size of a parish/county most other places. Nominally 80,000-150,000 people in the city/metro limits. all of those things you mentioned were within 10 minutes of my house, including a "German butcher" and a non-German butcher, salons, barbers, etc. there was a pretty big mall within 10 minutes, too.

Whittier's population was "quaint" when i lived there, as it's 100% US suburb, with a long way to go to get to any freeway/interstate.

[hattmall]

40 miles to a grocery store is not living in a "small town" that's living in a rural area or the country side.

[pyrale]

To add to this, I live in the suburb of a large European city, and the same is true here, except owners change more often. It is also true in the city center.

[mcosta]

What is the average salary in that town?

[ben_w]

Berlin and surrounding towns and cities. Before the pandemic/brexit, also found them in the UK, but visits afterwards suggest catastrophic decline at least in the specific places I visited.

Just because we also have malls, doesn't mean we only have malls.

[lukan]

"Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores?"

Im vibrant city centers of every bigger city I visited. The ugly malls are taking over much and online ordering is heavy pressure, but some are still very much alive.

[eszed]

Vibrant city centers in the US have small stores, too - even town centers in high-income areas. In Europe (especially, in my experience, France) they're common, because they've supported and subsidized them in all sorts of un-economically "optimized" ways. Americans prefer them, too, though - when they can afford them; they just haven't made having that kind of economy a political priority.

[plastic-enjoyer]

Depends on what city you live in, and what part of the city you live in.

[esperent]

> Where in Europe do you find large amounts of small stores?

Literally every city and town.

[alchemism]

Athens Greece would blow your mind, friend.

[hattmall]

Oh absolutely. It's also a specific segments of America. I hope Europe and elsewhere can resist but it really requires regulation because people in general are too easy to steer via advertising and convenience value propositions.

Definitely places in the US where you want find this commoditization of experience.

[tsss]

Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different. I don't know what a "subscribe n save is" but I can find a Western Union, gambling hall and vape shop on every street corner.

[plastic-enjoyer]

> Don't act as if the cities in Europe look any different

They do look different, claiming otherwise is just American cope

[bigblind]

I feel like they do and they don't at the same time. The buildings may look different, but city center rents driving out a lot of small local businesses, and leaving the same brands everywhere.

[plastic-enjoyer]

You are right, that the city centers are often heavily commodified to the point where they do not differ from other cities anymore. However, European cities are not just the city center, you have a lot of different districts where the commodification has not progressed to this degree as in the city centers. Case in point, you often do have small grocery stores in those districts, mostly owned by immigrants or they are some kind of organic food store.

[triceratops]

American cities also have ethnic neighborhoods, immigrant-owned grocery stores, and organic food stores.

[eszed]

You're right, too, but also in the European chain stores - Carrefour and Spar, and the like - I see more quality produce and local cheese and regional products than I do in North American equivalents. They're sold right alongside the commodity, international-brand stuff, and usually is price-competitive. The best apples I ate on my last trip to Spain I bought in a motorway services; they looked like they'd been grown next door, and maybe had been.

[tsss]

I'm not American. I live in Europe and know very well how it is here.

[PeterStuer]

I think a significant contributer to franchize style commoditized homogenization is modern anxiety. Millenials especially seem near exclusively drawn to the 'predictable' and curated 'peer approved' nature of recognizable 'safe' brand signals.

[sph]

You are seeing the effect for the cause. Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.

Any caveman would have loved to have to choose between favourite junk food franchises instead of risking his life chasing woolly mammoths not to starve.

[ErroneousBosh]

> Humans (life in general) are effort minimizer machines, it doesn’t mean that maximum optimization is the ideal environment for a human to thrive.

My 5-and-a-half-year-old son would recommend this book to you:

https://www.booksfortopics.com/book/the-couch-potato/

It covers this quite succinctly.

[vladms]

From what I see, there are many people that don't want to be "bored" more than the people that don't want to be "tired". Of course there are many that want to be neither (so we get social media that gives you "not bored" and "not tired"), but I don't think we can generalize for 100% for neither category.

[throw4847285]

We’re tired and bored. We're tired and bored. We're tired and bored. We're tired and bored.[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBngZh8H2FU

[sph]

It helps to view it under a neurological perspective.

Not being bored = likely scrolling social media = dopamine release = the exact mechanism that reinforces patterns and behaviours in our brain, which under some conditions can reach stages of compulsion. I loath to blame the individual when these systems are designed to exploit flaws in human behaviour.

I recently read a self-help book by B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford Behavior Design Lab (formerly known as the Persuasive Technology Lab) that was boasting how he mentored the Instagram founders and helped them optimize their app for maximum engagement. The book itself was pretty good, but I couldn't help but think I'm reading the words of a complete sociopath that has indirectly caused untold psychological damage, and was pretty proud about it.

Is it Jane Doe's fault that she's now hopelessly addicted to Instagram?

[keybored]

It was at this supposed peak of Dopamine Fracking that intellectual conversation found a renaissance. Anthropology in particular reached its pinnacle in a unifying theory of everything: it’s just human nature.

[goodpoint]

By this logic travel and tourism would not exist.

[leonidasrup]

"Travel outside a person's local area for leisure was largely confined to wealthy classes, who at times travelled to distant parts of the world, to see great buildings and works of art, learn new languages, experience new cultures, enjoy pristine nature and to taste different cuisines."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism

[vincnetas]

well, we are also a bit of pleasure machines also. And most of vacations are relaxing. So again optimisation.

[veunes]

When housing, healthcare, work, social life all feel unstable, the predictable option starts looking less like boring conformity and more like one less decision that can go wrong

[SauntSolaire]

What's being discussed is not at all limited to people experiencing instability

[neutronicus]

That's definitely the case for my wife.

She lives in terror of being grossed out or impatient, or our children complaining. Her favorite places are ones where she didn't have to wait, never wondered whether we'd been forgotten, where parking was easy, where our son ate the food, where the food didn't gross her out, where the finishes look new/spotless, and something about the atmosphere of the place set her mind at ease about no one paying attention to our children's behavior.

Chains are very good at ticking these boxes. Independent places always seem to have slow service, or a dirty bathroom, or a dingy finish, or poorly-separated seating so that she feels like our son is bothering other patrons, or no kids' menu, or no parking lot, or just manage to put her off in some way. "Feel dirty". "Feel sketchy".

I really don't know if it's the chicken or the egg. Is it because chains are familiar? Or is it because it takes a corporate arm to understand the existential necessity of "not putting off high-achieving white women" and to do the market research it takes to actually achieve that aim? IDK

[basisword]

I don't think that's a millennial thing. If you think back to the whole 'hipster' era, yes peer approval was a big part of it but so was local/artisan/unique stuff. Franchises were the things that were completely avoided. That predictability is much more of a modern requirement.

[raverbashing]

Not sure it's a millenial thing, but yes

And to be honest choice fatigue also plays a part.

(Also millenials seem to sell some places as "gritty and authentic" when in reality a lot of them just suck)

I'm all for trying new things, but in the end you realize that a lot of those are just not for you and you go for the bland and tested thing

[zimpenfish]

For me (considerably older than millenials) it's not choice fatigue or "default to bland and tested", it's "if I'm paying a small fortune for coffee / food[0], I do not want a crappy serving just because the barista/cook stubbed their toe / broke up / got bad news / etc. this morning and they're wildly off their game."

Starbucks, McDonalds, Papa Johns, etc. do not make "great" refreshments but they make them of a consistently sufficient level of quality that you can be sure you're not wasting your small fortune when you buy from them wherever you are.

[0] As, sadly, we are all forced to these days.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Is this a US thing? Coffee in Starbucks is so mediocre that it is hard to imagine a proper coffee place ever "matching" it, even on a bad day.

[zimpenfish]

> Is this a US thing?

I'm in the UK. Some local coffee shops can turn out exceptionally terrible coffee.

[raverbashing]

Agree

But then, once I got to certain McD locations, and got a (very) disappointing experience, then it's hard to come back to the brand.

(it might have changed, I think this was over 10 yrs ago) but still

[Gigachad]

At least in Australia pretty much all the chain places like McDonalds/subway etc suck so bad it’s incredible they are still in business. They aren’t even winning on price.

[neutronicus]

In the US I have noticed a huge quality gap between chain locations in the suburbs (pretty good) and in the city (abominable).

I don't think this is true in "glamor" cities, but in Baltimore where I live every Chipotle location is known to be terrible. Hostile employees, menu items constantly out of stock, orders wrong. People who patronize and love suburban locations are shocked.

I'm not sure if the independent restaurants are siphoning off all the decent employees (especially the managers who you'd think would try and make sure there's enough product to meet demand), or if it's just that much more difficult to get delivery trucks to city locations, or if corporate just wants to close the city locations and doesn't mind setting them up to fail, or what.

But it's stark.

That's not even getting into McDonald's or KFC which are legitimately ratchet in the city and pretty wholesome out in the burbs.

[sleepycat801]

It's more a side effect of decision fatigue. Millennials are at a stage of life where they face a very high cognitive burden. They're not thinking deeply about it. which is great for advertisers.

[zuzululu]

Perhaps but I also think this is just personal preferences across age groups.

For instance contrarians who avoid those attributes

[eptcyka]

I do not believe the majority of millennials are like this.

[canpan]

All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere.

Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..: Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..

[dormento]

You know, I always felt it but struggled to describe. This is exactly how it feels. Commoditization is inevitable, but the loss of identity that comes with leaves the impression that every city is one of those old-west movie prop ghost towns.

[Towaway69]

The world is becoming such that anywhere is like everywhere and everywhere is like anywhere.

At least major western cities are turning into the same-same but different tourists.

[4ggr0]

> a little further from there a McDonald's

in my experience there's like 3 of them on every one of these big streets, puzzling how many McD's exist.

[mcosta]

And these streets are always full

[zuzululu]

> Starbucks / Chipotle / Orange Theory / Target / Generic Brewery / Lime Scooter / Waymo / Subscribe N Save

I've never been to any one of these except Starbucks but only like a six times and Chitpole ONCE.

I've also never been to Taco Bell. McDonalds I've been to thirty times.

I don't think I'm alone? These places don't have that exaggerated pull that is often discussed in alarmist articles.

I guess I just don't eat outside at all so I could be the minority.

[coldtea]

>I don't think I'm alone?

Alone or not, you're hardly representative. They are huge corporate behemoths because 100s of millions go there.

And if you personally do avoid those, you likely still don't avoid 50 others like them. Like, you don't go to those, but shop at Amazon. Or ride Uber. etc

[ErroneousBosh]

I lived in Glasgow for 20-odd years, where you can get food from any region of any country in the world made by people from that region of that country, right there, fresh, right in front of you.

I've also eaten Taco Bell.

You're not missing much. It is much as you'd expect, a stepped-on Americanised parody of Mexican food. Even in the small north-eastern city of 150,000 people I live near now there are at least three places better than it for Mexican food.

Starbucks is absolutely rank. I suspect all the syrups and shit people pump in is just there because they a) don't actually like coffee and want some sugary milkshake, and b) don't know what coffee tastes like so are okay with the stale over-roasted to the point of just being burnt lukewarm rubbish that Starbucks sells.

The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!). I don't know if "Generic Brewery" is a real place or just a term for "oh hey you have to check <this place>" out, but if it's the latter then that would be Brewdog. Okay but not great beer, horrible horrible people.

I used to work at a small workshop in the south side of Glasgow where I'd go out and get a curry for lunch most days. The building looked semi-derelict but the shop itself was clean enough. Stainless counter, stainless kitchen units behind where two big Pakistani guys and their tiny grandmother who *everyone* deferred to cooked up curry. Cracked lino, scuffed formica tables.

You went in, you bought curry and a can of Coke. What kind of curry? Whatever they'd made that day. There was one, or maybe two if they also had a veg-only one on. It was whatever Naniamma had told them to make that day. Your menu choice was buy the curry or don't. Doesn't matter either way. Four quid please, want a fork?

It was always superb, and 20 years later I can still taste it just thinking about it. This is the kind of place you could eat.

[zimpenfish]

> The rest of those don't really exist in the UK (yet!).

Chipotle and Lime scooters do exist in the UK (and have for a while.) Waymo (I'm assuming the driverless taxis here) are just starting to appear in London. Apparently there's an Orange Theory Fitness in Derby (which has the same logo as the US one and therefore I'm assuming it's the same company.)

(Amazon and some smaller stores have been doing "subscribe and save" for years. But I'm not sure if that's the same thing?)

> [curry shop]

There was a great Thai place on one of the North Acton industrial estates back in ~2010 - tiny place, scuffed formica tables, terrifying grandmother taking your order, similarly small menu. Still the best Pad Thai I've had.

[ErroneousBosh]

> Still the best Pad Thai I've had.

You know you've found the right spot when you're the only white guy in a hundred metre radius of the place.

Small north-east of Scotland town, county cricket match at the cricket club between predominantly Indian and Pakistani teams. Food trucks came up from Leeds to do the catering. Every time I went up to one the guy behind the counter would look at me with wide eyes and say in a concerned tone of voice "You know what's in this, right? You know what you're eating?"

Dude, hit me with the desi shit, keep it coming. Yes of course I know what it is, it's not like I've never had mutton liver before. Here's 20 quid, package some up for me to stick in the freezer.

[c22]

Same for me, but I stopped counting my McDonald's visits after 25...

[dredmorbius]

That's a trend which has been emerging for a long time. Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) is an early take, this is a theme of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (1962), though Steinbeck was taking pains to avoid the then-brand-new Interstate Highway System. Two decades later, Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways chronicles a similar trip.

Growth of both suburbs (Levittown, 1947, Interstate Highway System (1956), shopping mall (1950s/60s), and fast food franchises (McDonalds, bought out by Ray Kroc in 1961, Kentucky Fried Chicken, now KFC, 1952), greatly accelerated the trend especially in the 1960s and 1970s, aided by mass-market television advertising.

Homogenisation of US culture, shopping mall / strip mall / franchise culture were all pretty well developed by the 1980s / early 1990s. The specific franchises have been changing (Starbucks does date to the early 1970s, but really boomed during the 1990s, Target is similar, most of your other examples are post-2010). I recall complaints of travelling, often well outside the US, only to be faced with the same mix of stores, restaurants, brands, and products one would find within a typical US city or suburb, already by the 1990s.

I'm not saying that this isn't bad. Just that it's been going on for a long time.

[iceman28]

I don’t know if I’d club fast food restaurants into the dopamine factory category. I see it as more of a necessity as I don’t think I can go hunt or gather food during my lunch break at the office.

[nicoburns]

I used to work near a food market where there were dozens of independent good stalls that were setup to serve working people lunches. The food was still fast, but a lot healthier, and you could go to one place and have a wide choice of options.

[mckn1ght]

There’s a lot of possibility in between hunting and eating fast food. Buy some healthy food at the grocery store and pack a lunch to bring with you.

[sleepycat801]

There is a formulation, a sugar/fat/salt ratio that the majority of people will find satisfying. Fast food tends to optimise this way. It's why, for example McDonalds burger buns are quite sweet.

But I don't know whether dopamine is the pathway responsible.

[jschveibinz]

I saw an interesting comment from the marketing gent Rory Sutherland. He calls it metric driven isomorphism. In other words, by collecting the same demographic data and redesigning products, all companies in the market tend toward some boring center that addresses the main needs/wants but reduces differentiation.

[hattmall]

Yeah, I mean, I've heard it called a lot of things, catering to the masses, least common denominator etc. It's really only a problem when it starts to consume so many resources in a given ecosphere that it pushes out everything else.

It's like a Times Square effect, Times Square used to be an actual interesting place, now it's just the bastard child of commercialization. It's happening or has already happened in most major cities and of course suburbs in the US. There's few holdouts, like Nashville, New Orleans and Atlanta that still are just somewhat untamable.

[mos_basik]

> New Orleans

Unfortunate that we'll lose that one to the ocean in the next 10-50 years.

[praptak]

This is alienation as described by Marx. If you optimize a thing, at some point it becomes separated from its nature.

[epolanski]

On the contrary I think they converge for what's inline with the average user, a sort of neutral and familiar "taste" of everything from operations to design.

[veunes]

Yeah, I think cities are probably the clearest physical-world version of this

[te_chris]

To nit pick: Micromobility is the opposite of this.

[underdeserver]

Eh, I don't use Lime Scooters or Waymo for the dopamine, I use them to get to where I need to go.

[JohnBooty]

Yes. I think convenience/utility explains a lot of these “depressingly homogenized experiences” far more than dopamine-seeking.

My life is very, very full. I do not have enough hours in the day, or years in my life, to fulfill all of my obligations and chase all of my dreams and interests. Not even close.

So I buy a lot of clothes from Old Navy, because they offer tall sizes that I need (surprisingly rare) and I honestly just have other things to do with my time. I’m aware there’s a whole world of interesting fashion out there, I just have 100 other things I want/need to spend my time on.

It’s the same with food, a lot of the time. Sometimes I just need a known quantity.

The restaurant chains know this, too. Sure… the commercials are all about satisfying your dopamine needs. But the way they actually run their operations is all about enforcing consistency. A Big Mac is supposed to taste the same everywhere. If you are a McDonalds franchisee, you can pick and choose which McDonalds products and promotions you sell (you can operate without selling french fries, if you’re crazy enough) but you absolutely cannot customize the ones you do sell.

(Yes, there are regional differences between McDonalds in different regions. Even within the US, there are some small differences due to regional suppliers and ingredient price/availability etc. However, these are very small differences and trust me, they really are laser-focused on consistency.)

[ncruces]

Also I'm not sure either is "bad for society" in the way that's implied.

Rentable scooters/bikes being dumped everywhere by idiots is an issue, but parked in city approved places they're a boon.

They can make transit incredibly more useful for thousands of people in slightly less dense places.

The nearest subway to me is 2km away. It's much nicer to be able to rent a scooter for 5min than having to take it with me for the whole ride, or have it locked to a pole with 100s others.

As for Waymo I dunno if a vehicle the size of a car just driverless is the answer to mobility issues, but anything that reduces the number of moving and parked cars in cities is a win in my book.