At least, like, ten or eleven questions about the direct-to-consumer bardo
It’s that time of year in Chicago when it’s cold enough that you don’t want to be outside any more than the bare minimum, so when you’re early to a place you have to find another spot to hang out in, or you freeze.
This happens regardless of duration. I arrived 15 minutes early to a hang recently. That is too little time to go anywhere, realistically, so you aren’t really doing anything, just killing time. Normally I would wander the neighborhood, look at houses, vibe in a park. It was cold. I must hide. I wasn’t in the market for anything, and I didn’t need any groceries, so I needed to find a coffee shop to kill time in. I pulled up Yelp and remembered that a local spot had decent coffee and seating, so I went.
That spot is Foxtrot, a local chain of shops that seems to be growing like Starbucks. The coffee was fine; it’s from a local roastery, it cleared my bar.
While I waited, I wandered the space, and found myself in a sort of direct-to-consumer bardo. Everything was either local, or sold through one independent online store. It hit right at first blush; buying local feels good, after all. And then I got thinking, and now there is text.
A stand is being taken. Foxtrot is opinionated, and it manages to be opinionated in a way that appeals broadly enough to result in 15 stores in just about every fancy spot in town. That is a hard line to walk. Compromises are made, occasionally, but you don’t notice or care.
There has to be a genre of human who wanders into Foxtrot not knowing much about what’s on offer. You don’t go to Foxtrot to buy Coke. You go because of its wall of craft sodas, most of which are full of CBD. Everything scans as what it is, but there is something else to each of them. The difference is the selling point. It’s a nod from young people to other young people.
One big difference is that everything is designed. If you want to get someone into packaging design as a profession, take them to Foxtrot. The only packaging that isn’t extremely on-point with contemporary vibes belongs to the sorts of brands that people buy in order to feel like a kid again: the rare box of Lucky Charms in the dried goods aisle, or the bottles of Topo Chico next to all the CBD seltzer.
Another big difference is that most of Foxtrot isn’t overly global-corporate. Nestlé has a small footprint at Foxtrot. Local confectioners and DTC brands take center stage. As a result, you know hardly any of the brands, even if they all look good on face.
I have been here before. When I was in New York this past June, I found a cool-looking market across the street from where I was headed, and encountered dozens of brands I’d never heard of, most of which were of similarly high design. That was a mall. This is a grocery store. They have the same energy.
There is something deeper going on here. Those who shop at Foxtrot are creating their own worldviews from scratch. They find the right lighting, status signal with the right products, and flag as a certain kind of person to their peers. They go home once a year, encounter people who shop at a regular grocery store, and think ugh, so old. DTC is one way of chasing youth, but it is also what substitutes for true progressive worldbuilding for those who have no real incentive to do so.
There is a darker side, of course, which is that younger people don’t often go in independent bodegas, especially in the sorts of neighborhoods that Foxtrot happens to exist in. We walk past 8 abandoned spots and find Foxtrot, gleaming in the distance. We don’t know half the brands they sell, but we know they look good. Then we pay an awful lot of money for that craft soda.