Why I became more subscription-conscious (and you should, too).
Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.
In my junior year of college, I wound up with a free subscription to a bunch of magazines, including Real Simple. To this day, I have no idea how it happened, and if my bank account or credit card had been charged at the time, I would have remembered. But it wasn’t. So, even though I hadn’t paid for them, for much of that school year, magazines would show up in my mailbox; and apart from Real Simple, I’d mostly ignore the rest. Unable to remember any other analog subscriptions prior—even if this one was free—we’ll say this was my first. Not one that belonged to my parents, siblings, or friends, that I might have made use of, but one that was truly mine. This was 15 years ago.
Post-college, I briefly lived with my brother and benefited from all his subscriptions, many of them digital. When I eventually began graduate school and moved out, I would acquire my own first digital subscriptions, too—although these, I actually signed up and paid for. Back then and soon after, the $9.99 for Spotify and $7.99 for Netflix didn’t feel like chump change, although it didn’t exactly break the bank. Either way, both seemed like a good deal. At least, a better deal than the price iTunes charged for individual songs and albums, and the cost of renting or buying individual movies from a store, or paying for cable.
It’s been over a decade since I completed graduate school, and since then, in addition to my first two digital subscriptions (and my unintentional first magazine subscriptions), I’ve at some point or another (and quite frankly, altogether) been subscribed to Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Tidal, various print and digital magazines and newspapers, multiple money managing and investing apps, CitiBike, Uber One, Zoom, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime (#judgeaway), HUM vitamins, and more. This is all without mentioning the endless products I’ve bought online then temporarily and periodically subscribed to, whenever they’ve offered a discount for doing so.
It’s an excessive and exhaustive list, but in my defense, having studied and then covered culture, some of these subscriptions were for work, and the cost was either free for a time or could at least be counted as expenses for my taxes. Others were arguably also because of work due to having less time to myself; during certain periods in my life, hunting for home goods in a store just didn’t seem like a good use of my time when I could just search for them on a database and have them delivered to my door.
At a certain point, however, I gradually began to realize something much more fundamental had been lost in all the “convenience” I’d been paying for. I was becoming less conscientious of how my choices were not just directly affecting my physical locale, but the people who live and work in it. Sure, in theory, I said I valued my neighbors, residents and businesses alike, but I’d make critiques about the changing neighborhood (“there goes the neighborhood!”) without implicating myself in those changes. More thoughtful and purposeful encounters with my community had been sacrificed at my altar of convenience.
So, I began to unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.
Looking back, my subscription-ending journey—or perhaps more accurately, subscription-consciousness journey—was a product, at least in part, of post-COVID lockdown reflections on what I really need and how I’d really like to spend my time. The excess of my subscriptions had started to feel akin to hoarding, and I needed to clear space, even if most of that space was intangible. There was also the lightbulb realization that has become more and more common amongst Millennials, that, despite our monthly investments in accessing various forms of media, we don’t actually own most of the culture that we consume. What’s more, should the companies that do own that media go defunct or be sold to entities that we may prefer not to do business with, we really wouldn’t have much recourse—except to unsubscribe.
This could mean years and years of playlists and TV shows and films that we would no longer have access to because they were never really ours to begin with, ultimately leaving us with nothing. And while I’m not interested in owning many things from culture, save for books and some fashions, I do think ownership of culture in its various forms serves more than capitalistic desire. Our things can be physical memories of what we love or once did, what has been passed on and gifted to us, and sometimes, reminders of what we saved and scraped for—emblems of hard-fought earnings. We are robbed of this when we choose to rent something out of convenience or compulsion instead of mindfully acquiring things that are truly meaningful to us.
We also aren’t the only ones both literally and figuratively footing the bill for our abundance of subscriptions: The obvious, of course, is that small, local businesses pay the ultimate price for our overreliance on the monopolies cannibalizing our choices. There’s an impersonal, persistent transactional relationship that develops when you constantly have things delivered to you via third parties. It’s not your favorite delivery person from your favorite Jamaican spot; it’s just the person that first picked up the order who you’ll likely never see again. It’s not the local hardware store owner that understands which tools work best for your apartment because they know other people in your building dealing with the same problem; it’s you endlessly scrolling through the best reviewed or highest quality or cheapest options online, hoping the tools you’ve chosen will get the job done. It’s missing out on a discount from the owner of the neighborhood craft and candle store—who unbeknownst to too many others, can also act as a notary—and choosing a digital coupon over a beautiful reminder that you’re part of a community.
Moreover, overconsumption inevitably leads to resource depletion, and in this brave new world where the latest AI technology permeates everything we do (sometimes against our will), even the climate-conscious among us are contributing to it negatively. Binge-watching or binging-anything-digital also has adverse health effects, including on our mental health and sleep, and we’re yet to fully grasp all of its socio-psychological effects, not to mention its contribution to our loneliness and isolation crises.
When I think about the last 15 years of subscribing—and lately, unsubscribing—I’ve had to admit that like many of us who live during this time, I sacrificed more convenience for less community, ownership of important things for access to seemingly everything, and gave my contact information to a bunch of companies whose aim is to profile my habits and patterns with little care for how my day is going. Unlike my favorite delivery person at my favorite Jamaican spot, who never fails to ask.
Today, I don’t have as many subscriptions as I once did, and for different reasons. I downgraded or fully got rid of some streaming services because I didn’t watch them enough and I felt the value didn’t match the price—especially as prices have hiked significantly in the last few years. My short stint with CitiBike was because quite frankly, I’m more of a walker and a subway rider—and I’ve accepted once again that biking regularly for transportation is just not something I enjoy. Meanwhile, while I’ve kept some print literature, I’ve ended other subscriptions or kept them as digital-only because they were starting to need their own storage space in my home—and I couldn’t lend or donate them fast enough. And of course, with subscriptions like Amazon Prime, I decided I could no longer live with the cognitive dissonance of having it while being opposed to its labor politics and the politics of its owner. (Unfortunately, this has also meant ending a more than decade-long affair with Whole Foods, which I unashamedly enjoyed as much as the farmer’s market I still frequent.)
I don’t think I’ll ever be subscription-free. I still have Netflix, and although Tidal had replaced Spotify in my life for many years due to its higher-quality sound, I missed my old playlists and collaborations on the latter and decided it’s one excess I can live with for now. But I’ve also returned to collecting vinyl again, shopping for most things in-person, and living with things taking as long as they need to get to me if I do order them online. Putting an end to the mindless and endless subscribing has made me more mindful of the things that I do want showing up in my digital and physical mailbox once a month. Because unlike 15 years ago with that accidental analog subscription, I’m making a conscious choice for them to be there.
The short answer is yes—but it hasn't proven easy.
When the all-organic frozen food company Amy’s Kitchen went into the fast food business in 2015, it seemed like the industry was primed for a major shift.
That year, McDonald’s had given customers the option to have a salad instead of fries with their meals for the first time, even adding a baby kale and spinach blend to its menu. The “signs point to a sea change in consumer demands when it comes to fast food,” read one article in Civil Eats—and Amy’s’ founders, husband and wife team Andy and Rachel Berliner, were ready for it.
“We’ve just reached a tipping point in a whole new level of interest in eating better,” Andy Berliner told TIME. In July, they opened their first Amy’s Drive-Thru location in Rohnert Park, California, a small city north of San Francisco. From the start, they sought to do things differently. Workers made $12 an hour—at the time, well above the state minimum wage of $9 an hour, the standard pay for starting workers at most California fast food restaurants. The way Amy’s purchased ingredients for its all-vegetarian menu was different from the big fast food chains, as well: The restaurant’s suppliers were the same small and medium-scale organic farmers they worked with on the frozen food side of the business.
By 2021, Amy’s had opened two more drive-thru locations in Northern California, with plans to open 25 to 30 more in California, Oregon, and Colorado over the next five years. The idea was to show everyone from Wall Street to McDonald’s that organic, plant-based fast food could be profitable, and that people accustomed to eating mass-produced beef burgers would gladly eat an alternative made from fresh vegetables as long as it was convenient, tasty, and cost around the same price.
But then, last February, less than two years after announcing its expansion plans, Amy’s closed a store near Sacramento, then another near Los Angeles. Their entire drive-thru business seemed to be scaling back. To some, it seemed as though Amy’s’ grand ambitions for a more ethical fast food chain had been mislaid. This wasn’t exactly the case—but looking under the hood reveals some of the challenges that come with creating an industry more focused on the wellbeing of its employees and suppliers, instead of just perpetual growth.
~
Perched next to a freeway exit right alongside an In-N-Out and a Chik-fil-A, Amy’s’ flagship drive-thru in Rohnert Park looks a lot like its fast food peers, but with a few differences, like a plant-covered “living roof,” a water tower to collect rainwater, and a dining room and patio filled with recycled wood furniture. At 4,000 square feet, it’s a big restaurant, but even at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon—typically one of the slowest hours of the week for any fast food joint—there were quite a few people dining in, and even more lined up in their cars outside to grab a bite from the drive-thru window.
“When we first opened, there were cars up the street,” Rachel Berliner told me as she and Amy’s president Paul Schiefer showed me around. The customers aren’t overflowing like they were on that first weekend, she explains, but there are plenty still coming in.
With her long white hair and grandmotherly demeanor, Berliner looks nothing like the typical fast food executive, for whom a family farm—let alone the farmers themselves—would be about as familiar as the surface of the moon. But over the last few decades, she’s grown used to standing out. When Rachel and her husband started Amy’s Kitchen in 1987, organic food wasn’t a consumer trend, much less a standard enshrined in federal law. But they believed access to it was important, and as certified organic food—meaning food grown without pesticides or genetically-modified seeds, among other criteria—boomed, the Northern California company spearheaded its entrance into grocery and convenience stores across the US with a line of vegetarian pizzas, burritos, and frozen entrees, now sold in nearly 50,000 stores in twelve countries.
After more than two decades in business, expanding into fast food wasn’t necessarily an obvious choice. But for the socially-minded pair, it made sense for the same reasons frozen food had years earlier: It was a way to bring the virtues of vegetarian organic food to the masses by giving it to them in a form that was familiar and accessible.
That sense of familiarity permeates throughout Amy’s’ flagship store. Inside the kitchen, flatscreen monitors list the current orders for staff, just like they would at any fast food restaurant. All the way in the back, there’s a walk-in freezer for storing patties and buns, made in the same factories where Amy’s makes its frozen foods. A long row of flat-top griddles churns out these “burger” patties, made from organic soy, bulgur wheat, oats, and a few kinds of vegetables, and “chik’n” patties, made mostly from soy. Salads are made to order. Whereas most fast food kitchens receive their lettuce prewashed and chopped, each of Amy’s’ now three drive-thru locations receives daily produce deliveries, complete with whole heads of lettuce, which staff tear and wash by hand each morning—a characteristically old-fashioned way of preparing food in an otherwise high-tech environment.
~
In an industry that’s constantly looking for ways to speed up service, and pushing staff to their limits in the process, Amy’s’ often low-tech but labor-intensive methods stand out. So does its commitment to paying staff above the industry standard: While a statewide boost to the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour threw most fast food companies into a panic earlier this year, the move hardly affected Amy’s, which had been paying workers above minimum wage since its inception. (Better pay is also one reason why Amy’s says it retains employees at a higher rate than the industry at large.)
But what is most radical about Amy’s compared to its fast food peers is its model for sourcing raw materials. Instead of buying ingredients from the massive, intermediary corporations that dominate the food system in the way virtually any fast food company does today, it works directly with the farmers that have long supplied its frozen food business: For its burger alone, Amy’s says it sources ingredients from 30 farmers.
“We’re definitely deeply embedded in the small, mid-size farming network as a long-term partner,” Schiefer said on our kitchen tour. “A lot of these farms… want someone who’s stable and consistent and who will be there for each crop cycle.”
A supply network built on small-scale farmers is unique within the fast food industry today, but it’s not entirely without precedent. When it started in Southern California shortly after the Second World War, even McDonald’s sourced most of its beef from local ranchers. In the early 1950s, the company went as far as experimenting with raising cattle itself on a ranch in Grass Valley, California—a fact it proudly announced to customers.
By the 1960s, McDonald’s had locations all over the country and relied on a network of up to 200 different beef producers to supply them. But with the advent of cryogenic freezing technology at the end of the decade, the deliverable range of beef increased dramatically. Instead of buying from a network of small producers, McDonald’s went to a handful of big ones, like OSI, JBS, and Tyson Foods, to provide the vast majority of its beef, both in the US and around the world. Since they dominated the industry, these companies could keep their prices down, usually to the detriment of the ranchers who raised the cattle.
While different fast food companies have adopted their own tactics over the years, the biggest have all turned to the same playbook, pressuring suppliers to grow exponentially alongside them to keep costs down, or risk getting replaced. It’s an arrangement that’s given fast food companies massive influence over the food system. But some environmentalists have argued that such concentrated power isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to sustainability. Writing for Wired, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg say a concerted effort by fast food companies to bring meat alternatives to the masses, for example, would lower the cost of fake meat and “propel research and development that could slash GHGs and improve [their] nutritional profile.”
As more people start to see their dietary choices as ethical ones, fast food companies, new and old, are already plotting ways to get just as big as the major chains, but with more “ethical” menu offerings. One newcomer is Kernel, a high-tech vegetarian chain launched in New York earlier this year by Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle. Though not a vegetarian himself, Ells says he was inspired to scale vegetarian fast food after reading about the climate impact of animal agriculture. Itsu, a British chain serving Asian-esque food, is considerably older, having launched in 1997 by Pret a Manger founder Julian Metcalfe, but still dynamic. Once known for selling sushi to London office workers, as it started expanding outside the UK two years ago, the company shifted more of its menu over to vegetable dishes made with rice and noodles. Unusual for a chain that still sells a lot of sushi and poke, Itsu even banned yellowfin tuna from its menu entirely in 2022—a move Metcalfe called both “ethical and economical.”
While vegetarian menus have some inherent environmental and ethical benefits, many of the problems that have made the food system so ethically flawed in the first place are tied to its opacity rather than its choice of protein, and thus run deeper than menu changes can fix. When McDonald’s vowed to stop sourcing beef raised inside the Amazon biome in 1989, activists all over the world cheered the decision. More than three decades later, McDonald’s’ promise has proven more easily made than kept. In 2022, an investigation by Réporter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that a McDonald’s supplier in Brazil had purchased cattle raised on land deforested just months before.
In a statement, McDonald’s said it disagreed with Réporter Brasil’s findings and that it was “focused on conserving forests and supporting the people and communities around the world who depend on them.” But as the original investigation found, “There are no comprehensive mechanisms in [McDonald’s] supply chain to track—from birth to slaughter—the origin of cattle arriving at slaughterhouses” and eventually going into their burgers. In other words, McDonald’s knows which suppliers it’s purchased its beef from, but not who raised the cows.
There is also no reason to believe a big move towards fake meat would make its ingredients’ origins any easier to account for: The grains and vegetables that go into popular meat alternatives, like Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, are just as untraceable as McDonald’s beef. Regardless of what it’s selling, the fast food industry’s interlocking system of suppliers is almost too large to manage or even monitor—much less reform.
Amy’s’ supply chains are, in some ways, more complicated than either McDonald’s or Burger King’s, but the complexity is a conscious choice. Since the company buys directly from farmers instead of on commodity markets, it knows exactly which farms supply the ingredients for everything it sells, both in the frozen aisle and at its drive-thrus. (Traceability is also one of the requirements of the federal organic certification which Amy’s adheres to.) Some of those relationships have persisted for more than a decade, Schiefer says, with suppliers that grew produce for Amy’s Kitchen's frozen foods fifteen or twenty years ago now growing food for Amy’s Drive-Thrus. Amy’s even dispatches representatives to visit its partner farms at various stages of the crop cycle, from planting until harvest, to check on their supplies.
In another contrast to the big fast food chains, Schiefer adds that Amy’s doesn’t pressure suppliers to scale alongside it. By continuously buying organic produce, he says, the idea is to encourage more farmers to grow organic food and join it as suppliers instead of pressuring existing suppliers to get bigger.
“It’s harder, but it’s also more rewarding,” Schiefer says. “It means getting involved with agronomy researchers and seed breeders, working in partnership with growers. You can’t think of it as a commodity business. When you accept that complexity, you find your way there.”
~
Of course, getting raw materials is only one part of the fast food business. Labor is another part, as is real estate.
This last part is one that Amy’s turned out to be less prepared for. After Rohnert Park took off, the company opened other locations that were equally sizable. Business was good, Schiefer says of the store near Sacramento, but not good enough to stay open.
“We had hoped that it would be just a big trending thing everywhere,” Rachel Berliner says after our tour. Instead, Amy’s learned that the appetite for organic, vegetarian fast food was stronger in some areas than others. In the short term, Schiefer says, future restaurants will be smaller, and the company will be more particular when choosing where to open new locations. Once they master their “core demographic,” he says, Amy’s will be ready to pursue a more ambitious expansion plan once again.
The company’s founders don’t seem to mind pressing pause. In fact, Rachel Berliner sees a parallel between the drive-thru business and the company’s early days. “We grew very slowly when we started Amy’s because there were no organic farms,” she says, recalling they had to turn customers away for lack of supply. With more successes, more farms started growing certified organic food, widening the base of suppliers without farmers having to scale relentlessly, as they would working for most processed food companies. Now that the drive-thru business is growing, Berliner says, they’re following their own model and adding new stores gradually, paying workers a decent wage and maintaining their rigorous standards as they get bigger.
The difference is now there are plenty of farms to supply them.
[post_title] => Is An Ethical Fast Food Chain Possible?
[post_excerpt] => The short answer is yes—but it hasn't proven easy.
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“That’s an awful lot of money to go into a shop,” my friend, a creative director and no stranger to event planning, mused as we traded Paris Art Week VIP passes like baseball cards. In a single, whirlwind long weekend last October, we wended around the aisles of no fewer than five art fairs: The Paris Internationale, THÉMA, Design Miami/, Offscreen, and, the main attraction, Paris+ par Art Basel, having its second-ever iteration in France. Had we not shared and swapped those passes, we each would have been out upwards of €500, to say nothing of the fact that some of the passes were invite-only—priceless bits of currency during Art Week, where €500 is more or less considered pocket change. It is a rigamarole that would be repeated in another couple of months, at Basel’s next iteration, which would bear a striking resemblance to the version we’d seen in Paris. Yet it wasn’t so long ago that Basel just stayed put in Basel.
Before we go any further, “Basel” here refers to Art Basel, an art fair held in Basel, Switzerland each June. But these days, in addition to Paris, Basel is also in Miami, where there was another art fair earlier this month, and in Hong Kong, where there will be another fair in March. Indeed, like the British Empire, the sun never sets on Basel, a town of 171,000 otherwise known principally as the home of Roger Federer and Erasmus. And Basel isn’t alone: Miami’s Art Week empire has expanded, too. The sinkingtax haven—where, Lenny Bruce once said, “neon goes to die”—has its own Basel, Design Miami/, which now, in addition to Paris, meanders annually to Shanghai and, aber natürlich, Basel itself. At first glance, Basel (the city) and Miami (the city) might not seem to have much else in common, except for these never-ending art fairs—and, of course, the money required to go into the proverbial shop.
Why should any of this matter? Why should we care if largely the same group of egregious polluters—art collectors with private jets, influencers, hangers-on, DJs of inscrutable provenance—stomp their carbon footprints across continents to attend art fairs perennially named after the city they just left behind? As the old saw goes, it’s always five o’clock somewhere—and now, apparently, Art Week, too. Globally, Art Week now happens somewhere about as frequently as Independence from the British Empire is celebrated. And while the world that populates it might seem insular and frivolous to the point of farce, the sort of top-down, endlessly replicating model of speculation and monetization it represents should worry all of us: Those art fair carbon footprints are a garish harbinger of the death of a creative class, and of a wealth gap that will likely never close.
Like Fashion Week, which now takes place approximately 30% of the year, Art Week is inhabited by its own roving “world”—quite literally, a moveable feast—but the homogeneity of the art world is more profound than its cast of characters might suggest. Contemporary art, like high-end fashion, is largely the same in every major city on the planet, thanks in part to the strangle-hold of blue-chip galleries like Gagosian and Zwirner. None of it is really about art anymore. It’s about luxury. It’s about branding.
The point of all this globetrotting is the maintenance of a robust marketplace—and, at least as importantly, the very flashy appearance of one. The 2023 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report makes for some eye-watering reading:
Global art sales increased by 3% year-on-year to an estimated $67.8 billion, bringing the market higher than its pre-pandemic level in 2019…[but] there was also divergence in market segments, with the highest end continuing to be the driver for growth. In the auction sector, the highest-priced works of over $10 million were the only segment to show an increase on aggregate, while in the dealer sector, those at the higher end performed significantly better than their peers in the lower tiers. These trends continued to dampen any hopes of significant restructuring of old hierarchies in the post-pandemic art market, and sales continued to display the more familiar pattern of outperformance at the high end, buoying aggregate values but creating a denser concentration at the top.
Perhaps these numbers account for some of the manic laughter in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, when video artist Knox Harrington picks up the phone and announces to Julianne Moore’s Maude, “It’s Sandro, about Biennale.” And it’s only gotten crazier in the 25 years since the film came out. The art market is still behind luxury fashion’s $111.5 billion annual take, but not by all that much, especially when one considers how many fewer galleries, art fairs, and auction houses there are in the world, as opposed to the sheer number of luxury fashion stores and online platforms.
This wasn’t always the case. We have come a long way from the progenitor of the contemporary art fair, the so-called 1913 Armory Show, an exhibit designed to introduce Americans to Fauvism and Cubism, and artists not yet well known in the US, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The show was a watershed cultural moment, modernizing and commercializing an outdated European salon model. It also could only have happened in America. Originally hatched during the Royal Academy shows of the 17th and 18th centuries, the salon model had already matured into something more commercial during the 19th century, commensurate with the acquisitive tastes and expansive budgets born of the Industrial Revolution. Presciently, during this era, British art dealer Joseph Duveen observed, “Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money.”
A total of 87,000 New Yorkers saw the show before it decamped to Chicago. It heralded the ascendancy of art that pushed beyond the academic and the staid—where concepts of beauty and even the purpose of artistic expression were called into question. (Fashion Week would not come to the US until 1943.) At the New York fair, Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” sold for $324, or $10,172, adjusted for inflation. At Art Basel (Basel) this past June, one of Louise Bourgeois’ “spider” sculptures sold for $22.5 million on the first day of VIP previews.
So what caused the over 2,200% increase? To quote James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The percentage, while jaw-dropping, mirrors others with which we are all too familiar, such as executive compensation and urban real estate. Quite simply, it’s yet another manifestation of an incomprehensibly large and probably irreversible wealth gap. However, the art world cut a slightly different economic curve. After the contemporary art market crashed in the early 1990s—slumping in a series of scandals along with the rest of the country—large and institutional collectors shunned the sector. But by century’s end, it had begun creeping back, after the Clinton Years (featuring a star turn by none other than Carville) saw the first dot-com boom and bust: Not incidentally, works of art, beyond serving as status markers, are also fabulous places to hide and launder money. At around the same time, auction prices went up in late 19th-century and 20th-century art to unprecedented numbers.
It wasn’t until 2002 that Art Basel, an industry staple on the calendar since 1970, launched a fair in Miami, in part to nudge contemporary art back into the spotlight, financially speaking. (Some also credit the establishment of new major contemporary art institutions, like the Tate Modern in 2000, with the comeback.) And it worked. This resurgence of the market was so robust that it survived even the 2008 crash largely unscathed, reaching new heights with the emergence of an online market in the 2010s. The fair phenomenon only grew from there, naturally migrating to Asia as new billionaires were minted amid China’s boom—just as Joseph Duveen might have predicted.
Which brings us back to Art Week, the brand. Luxury is predicated on branding, and branding must maintain a consistency that, when achieved, is known as an “identity”—a handy euphemism for what Walter Benjamin famously defined as the aura of a work of art: equal parts authenticity (or uniqueness) and locale (within a physical space or culture). In fashion, Chanel sports its iconic chains and camellias; in contemporary art, a Gerhard Richter canvas damn well better look like a Richter. This identity, regardless of product, fulfills the Benjaminian equation: authenticity + locale = aura. The market then determines what price tag it can bear.
In 2023, the proliferation of locales (via the cultural and commercial context of an art fair) and the authenticity of the work it draws (a unique yet consistent group of A-list galleries and artists) creates an aura for the art world to the tune of many billions of dollars, if UBS is to be believed. To merit that sort of return on investment, the commodity must be recognizable; its identity, or aura, must be strong. This is attained through predictability, which—you probably don’t need Walter Benjamin to tell you—is rather inimical to artistic expression. And the easiest way to make the aura predictable is by an onslaught of art fairs, with little time between them for artists to actually create—well, art.
No matter what way you see it, there is great currency in this homogeneity for those who can afford to trade in it. Ultimately, the art, much like the people at each of the art fairs, is pretty much the same. Commodification demands it. Fittingly, the VIP attendees often turn out in regalia from the same dozen or so luxury fashion houses whose brick-and-mortar presence signifies a wealthy neighborhood anywhere in the world. As for the fair-goers, the barrier to entry is high at these events, too. Aside from travel, a gallery must put up around $20,000 for even a medium-sized booth at Art Basel and even more for shipping fees—and do so at multiple fairs per year. And you probably don’t need Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan to tell you very little of this money is trickling down to the artists themselves. It’s a content farm, with souvenir tote bags and champagne. (And, as my companion at Paris Art Week likes to note, the champagne sponsor for the art fairs is almost always the aptly named Ruinart.)
This exhausting, transcontinental treadmill has led to a contemporary art market that varies little fair to fair. How could it not? Who would spend all those millions on an unknown commodity they won’t be able to offload down the line? What kind of an investment would that be? The art world has never shied away from being self-referential, but a market is iterative. If one were dropped blindfolded into one of these art fairs, the chance of being able to tell in what city or at what event they had found themselves would be a longshot.
And that’s the point: Basel is everywhere. It’s all the same.
As a young girl, I had a spunky friend, who bossed me and dressed me, and she'd stand in her driveway, hand on her hip, taunting me, "How does it feel to want?"
It was a line in a film she saw.
At that time, I could not afford to want. But still, I wanted to have her hair, the way hairspray and crimping irons gave her that perfect Who’s The Boss, Alyssa Milano flair; her capacity to pick up dance moves, jumping off a chair like Janet Jackson in the “Pleasure Principle” video. I wanted her mom, how she sat with us at night and tickled our backs until we fell asleep, how she stocked the kitchen with healthy food, wheat germ, and honey.
Later, in foster care, I was nothing but a meat sack of want. I wanted privacy, time alone; I'd sometimes sit in the bathroom, door and eyes closed, blocking out everything outside. I wanted a home—a real home, with a dog and a family. I wanted to go back to my school where I was enrolled in accelerated classes—where I still had the freedom to dream of becoming a neurosurgeon, or a lawyer, or whatever profession would pull my mom and me out of poverty.
And the less I have, the more I want: Even now, I want ridiculous things with no purpose, the little capitalist elves getting to work on my brain. I want nail polish and lipsticks, nonsensical outfits—jumpers, one-pieces—boots, espadrilles, soaps and face creams. I want accolades, acceptance notices from fancy literary journals, and fellowships. And underneath it all, what I really want is love—to be seen, to be touched, to be held, to be kept, to be possessed wholly with all my good and all my naughty bits, a no turning away kind of love.
I want to move through the world with ease.
~
We try hard to make sense of things in a senseless time. My friend, who I'd spoken to every day before all this, but who's since been exposed to the virus, or some other cruel thing that has her sleeping and using an inhaler, says wistfully into the phone, "I miss malls."
Of malls, Frederic Jameson wrote in Postmodernism, “Overwhelmingly, our daily life, our psychic experiences, our cultural languages are processes performed in and contingent on commercial space.”
In the early days of the pandemic, I wonder what happens when we no longer have that commercial space or when that space becomes virtual. Where do we go when that pinnacle remains burning inside us, but the space to make it grow—disappears? What is America without the physical space to Want?
~
After World War II, Americans embraced the ideal of the suburbs. People moved away from big cities, and malls were a new indication of what LIVING would be like. For all those suburban households, the mall became the epicenter of activity, a place where we could brush arms with the Joneses. And all of us drove there—a luxury in itself. As Joan Didion writes in her essay "On the Mall," "as a child in the late Forties in California, I recall reading and believing that the 'freedom of movement' afforded by the automobile was 'America's fifth freedom.'"
The previous four were outlined in Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address: 1. Freedom of Speech, 2. Freedom of Worship, 3. Freedom from Want, 4. Freedom from Fear.
As for the third, what better homage is there to Want than the mall?
~
America's first malls were outdoors; they were to be community centers—our zocalo—where people could come together for social interaction. These first malls appeared in the 1920s. One of the earliest was opened in the California boom town of Lakewood. With its 154 acres and sprawling parking lot, the Lakewood Shopping Center transformed fields of lima beans into a big city suburb—a precursor for what was to come.
J.C. Nichols, generally regarded as the father of the shopping center for his role in developing Country Club Plaza in Kansas City (1924), established many of the mall’s fundamental merchandising and management concepts. Nichols’ 1945 Urban Land Institute publication, Mistakes We Have Made in Developing Shopping Centers, codified the tenets of the modern mall with a list of 150 maxims, which covered everything from strategies to ensure local political support to adequate ceiling heights.
In 1956, the first enclosed mall—Southdale, in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis—changed everything. It also firmly cemented Austrian architect Victor Gruen as one of America's great mall pioneers. Gruen created a completely introverted building by enclosing once-open spaces and controlling the temperature, establishing the prototype for how we think of most malls today. As William Kowinski illustrates in Malling of America, once inside, the commercial potential of enormous spaces was realized in theatrical "sets" where "retail drama" could occur. Southdale was covered for practical reasons; Minnesota weather allows for only 126 outdoor shopping days a year. But the contrast between the freezing cold or blistering heat outdoors and the mall's constant 72 degrees was only accelerated by its atrium centerpiece, the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, filled with orchids, azaleas, magnolias, and palms.
~
Kowinski identifies mal de mall (literal translation: bad of mall, which could be interpreted as mall sickness) as both stimulation and sedation, characterized by disorientation, anxiety, and apathy. Margaret Crawford writes in her essay “The World In A Shopping Mall” of The Gruen Transfer (named after Victor Gruen), which “designates the moment when a ‘destination buyer’ with a specific purchase in mind is transformed into an impulse shopper, a crucial point immediately visible in the shift from a determined stride to an erratic and meandering gait.”
These effects, in part, might help explain the expansion of the typical mall visit from twenty minutes in 1960 to nearly three hours today. Eventually, the mall became a place to cruise. For teenagers to hang out, and work, and steal, and kiss. Gallerias everywhere achieved a reputation as a safe place for singles to meet, and where "mall walkers"—senior citizens and heart patients seeking a safe place to exercise—could arrive before the shops opened to walk a measured route around the corridors.
To that end, terrazzo tiles were introduced in the '80s because developers thought the carpet would slow shoppers down. Architects also gradually increased lighting to create the illusion of longer afternoons. Finally, in 1992, the Mall of America opened, eventually featuring a whopping 5.6 million square feet of retail. The largest mall in North America, the mall sits just south of the Twin Cities, in Bloomington, Minnesota, and was built on the site of the former Metropolitan Stadium. To honor the location of home plate, the mall houses a plaque in its amusement park that commemorates a home run hit by hall-of-famer Harmon Killebrew on June 3, 1967—definitively placing this shopping center, and its absurd representation of excess, alongside America’s favorite past-time.
By the mid-90s, malls were being constructed at 140/year.
~
I was a latchkey kid when the Westside Pavilion finally arrived in Los Angeles in 1985; my young spunky friend who quoted movies about Want would raid her mother's empty Sparkletts of change, and we'd walk the two miles to the mall. We spent all day trying on clothes at Wet Seal and Contempo Casuals; we'd spend any money we had on Mrs. Fields' cookies or slices of pizza from Sbarro. We’d ride the escalator up and down.
Later the mall became a site for me to act out what feminist theorist Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism": “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” During the holidays, I'd go to the mall and finger all the items, look on longingly at the shoes and handbags, listen to the music, and see the line for Santa, and a part of me secretly hoped that perhaps someone would see me, and take pity on me, and offer to buy me all the things. But no one ever did.
~
There is, of course, a conventional association between women and mall space. Iconic films like Valley Girl and Clueless. Roseanne Barr's television show, wherein her title character worked in the mall. And then, there's the music.
I’m shuttin’ shit down in the mall
And tellin’ every girl she’s the one for me
And I ain’t even planning to call
I want this shit forever man, ever man, ever man, ever man
—Drake, “Forever”
For rapper Drake, girls are granted equivalence to stores as sources for reaffirmation of male dominance and economic success in the hip-hop market. As early as 1998, mall space provided a similar referent for Jay Z in "Can I Get A?":
Do you need a balla? So you can shop and tear the mall up?
Brag, tell your friends what I brought ya
Jay Z directs his curiosities about mall space to female listeners, engaging end rhyme between “mall” and “balla,” a term initially used to describe wealthy athletes but which now refers to anyone or even anything admirable. While these dialogues with mall space certainly perpetuate the same anti-feminist stereotypes—positioning women as shoppers and as “shopped” by the male speakers—they reproduce the very real social relations that occur in mall space, both through the exchange of money for clothing, and sexually, through the bodies of the spatial practitioners.
For example, around 10 AM on April 12, 2019, a woman and her 5-year-old son were standing outside the Rainforest Café on the third floor of the Mall of America when 24-year-old Emmanuel Aranda approached. She asked him if they were in his way and should move. Mr. Aranda, without warning, picked her son up and threw him off the balcony. When asked why he did it, he said he was sick and tired of years of being rejected by women at the mall.
~
My generation, Generation X, could also be aptly named the Mall Generation, as we were around in the before times of malls and now in the after. The before times, for me, were riddled with trips to the local Kmart. A store that allowed for layaway, where we posed for studio-like holiday photos, drank bright blue or red slushies, and ate at the Kmart Cafe.
The first Kmart opened in San Fernando, California, in January 1962; 1500 miles north, and five months later, Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Alaska. Both were the blueprint for what a mall could be. In our small military town in northern California, Kmart was one of the few places to hang out. I touched and longed for all the items, imagined a need and a stealthiness with the camping gear, and extended the fictive dream of Capitalism—that somehow being near Jaclyn Smith's discount clothing line put me in closer proximity to becoming one of Charlie's Angels myself.
In the ‘80s, Ma got a job as a security officer for Kmart, and when they were robbed, she was blamed and then let go of. Years later, I worked graveyard at the Winchell's Donut, and I, too, was robbed and then fired. In reality, Jaclyn Smith's discount clothing line just put me closer to who I always was, a girl whose Ma's bounced check was on display at the Food King on Westwood Blvd. A girl who was called to the front of the class with all the other poor kids to get her lunch tickets. The tickets she tucked into the side of her Payless Shoesource ProWings, a brand of shoes all the kids talked smack about.
~
In researching genres, I recently discovered a form of ‘80s minimalist literature called “dirty realism,” also known as "Kmart realism." Author Paul McFedries, in the craft book Word Spy: The Word Lovers Guide To Modern Culture, defines the precursors of Kmart realism as “trailer park fiction, Diet-Pepsi minimalism, and hick chic.” Miriam Clark writes in Studies in Short Fiction that it "represent[s] and reproduce[s] the disintegration of public life [and] the colonization of private life by consumer capitalism."
Authors Bobbie Ann Mason and Joy Williams are most known for this genre, likely coined by author Tom Wolfe in reference to stories that mention Dairy Queens and third-rate motels. In his introduction to Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader, George Saunders writes, "You could say, as critics have, that Mason is writing about a particular form of late-twentieth-century American sadness, a moment during which something has fundamentally shifted in the American ethos. The way I would say it is that she is bearing witness to our descent into a new era of pure materialism."
~
If Bobbie Ann Mason is representative of Kmart realism, then I wonder who or what literature would represent Caruso realism. I'm speaking here of Rick Caruso, the Los Angeles mall developer and mayoral candidate. Caruso's The Grove and The Americana at Brand are the epitome of Los Angeles' animated spaces, spaces that are part fairy ground and part extensions of the body of Los Angeles. Caruso's intentional use of mall space and large multi-use dwelling-consumer spaces have become LA's theme park phantom limbs, filling the ghost imprint of the homes and apartment units bulldozed in the mid-20th century.
Both The Americana at Brand and The Grove are organized upon the idea of a city center—with a mix of architectural styles, building heights, materials used, and vast open spaces at their center. The Grove is reminiscent of 1930s Los Angeles; meanwhile, The Americana reflects the brick factory facades of the industrial era, with its massive elevator shaft with exposed steel beams.
Each of the two intends to appear to be a public space but is private property and is protected as such. But if mall decor and design are not explicit enough to tell young people of color or the unhoused that they are not welcome, more literal warnings can be issued. A bronze plaque placed at the Grove's southern entrance spells out the house rules: "The Grove is private property and has not at any time been dedicated to public uses," listing 18 activities from which visitors must refrain. While the two-acre park in the center of the Americana is technically public property, the private security force that patrols it prevents anyone from photographing with professional equipment without permission. "Sitting on floors, handrails, stairs, escalators, trash receptacles and other areas not specifically designed for seating” is also restricted. The Americana at Brand allows dogs on the property—except on its grassy area, and unless the dog in question is a pit bull.
Still, in a city that lacks accessible public space, The Grove and The Americana provide a peek into an alternate reality. Pedestrianized streets. Seamless sidewalks. Reliable transit. Shady trees. Alissa Walker writes in New York Magazine, “Yes, in theory, the Grove represents the dystopian future where billionaire developers have cordoned off our public spaces into oversurveilled fortresses. But in reality, elements of this future are very appealing to Angelenos. That’s why they go there. If they don’t readily admit that they do, they’re lying. Everybody loves the Grove.”
I will confess here that in recent years, I, too, have found some joy at my local outdoor mall—Americana at Brand—after one winter, as the fake snow blasted upon us, my now-wife bent down on one knee and proposed beside the iconic dancing water fountain.
~
In 1787, Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, supposedly erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River to impress the Russian Empress and her guests on their way to Crimea. He would then disassemble and reassemble the village along the way. Today, the term "potemkin" is used in politics and economics as any construction whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country that is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better.
As I write this, Caruso is running for mayor, and some Angelenos are concerned that he will try to apply these same guidelines and principles to the entire city. "You go to the Grove; it represents everybody in this great city of ours. It's every background. It's every color. It's every creed," Caruso told the Los Angeles Times editorial board earlier this year. Often compared to Walt Disney, the 63-year-old is known for a similar pseudo-urbanism, equal parts utopianism and nostalgia. He’s also known for switching his party affiliation for the race, as he was very publicly registered as a Republican three years ago. Caruso is now making it to the general election after sinking millions of his own money into ads for his campaign, featuring actors and personalities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Snoop Dogg. The Americana, as I see it, is the modern-day Potemkin Village; and Caruso, the modern day Potemkin.
~
Being an off-brand kid—a Kmart kid, sometimes even in the time of malls—I was always consumed with desire; that achy want. The word consumption from the late 14th century to mean "wasting of the body by disease"; from Old French consumpcion, "A using up, wasting"; from consume, "the using up of material, destruction by use."
For me, it is a truly American experience to be overwhelmed with this desire to consume, to waste. I walk around my college campus and cut through USC’s University Village, a Caruso-endorsed project. In this instance, University Village is a $700 million multi-use development described by the LA Times as “a fantasia of just-add-water heritage, equal parts Disneyland and Hogwarts.” As trustee and longtime donor, Caruso has been quoted as stating, “It makes it a much more vibrant neighborhood.”
University Village is home to an Amazon pick-up center, a Target, a Trader Joe’s. But there’s most reliably a line outside of Dulce, an artisanal cafe and donut shop. I spy a plump matcha donut in the window dusted with sugar, a dollop of cream winking on the mouth-hole. I want it. Between classes, sweaty, and arm aching from my heavy book bag, I rush past a spa called Face Haus, where customers can stop in for an afternoon facial; I see the aestheticians, their face masks, an advertisement of a woman, her hair wrapped in a towel, eyes closed, relaxing beneath a cool layer of serums. I want it. Some days when I’m in need of comfort, a hug, words of encouragement, I linger a bit too long in front of Honeybird, with their southern fried chicken, banana cream pie; it smells like somebody’s home. I want it, too.
This year, I’ve received notice from two of my undergraduate students stating they had to leave the school after tuition was raised from the already-staggering $60k/year. They do not want to leave. I do not want them to leave. But they do not have what they need to stay. Money.
~
In 1943, The Saturday Evening Post published a series of oil paintings by the Americana artist Norman Rockwell that came to be known as “The Four Freedoms,” along with corresponding essays for each. “Freedom From Want” was published alongside an essay by Filipino writer and labor activist Carlos Bulosan. At the time, Bulosan was a migrant laborer working intermittent jobs when the Post tracked him down to contribute the essay. Initially, the Post lost it, and as there was no carbon copy, Bulosan had to track down the only other draft he had stashed at a bar in Tacoma.
Ultimately, Bulosan's essay proposed that while citizens had obligations to the state, the state had an obligation to provide sustenance to its citizens. Unlike Roosevelt, Bulosan presented the case that the New Deal had not already granted freedom from want as it did not guarantee Americans the essentials of life.
Lately, walking through University Village, I find myself thinking of Want. The facials, the nail salon, yes—but also, the grocery store. As an undergrad, every week, I’d buy a loaf of bread, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a container of instant coffee. I’d pour the milk on my toast for breakfast and dinner and use it to lighten and sweeten my coffee. I remember the anguish of passing the fast food restaurants on my campus; how the credit card companies would set up tables right outside the Burger King. It worked.
In 2022, it costs up to $30 a day to park on campus, but if you can nab it, there’s free parking on Frat Row off of Hoover. Here, there are people tabling, too—but rather than signing students up for credit cards, they’re selling test strips people can put in their drinks to make sure they aren’t roofied. It works.
If you travel about twelve miles southeast from USC, you’ll hit The Compton Towne Shopping Center, a mall not designed by Caruso. You likely won’t find many USC students there. Compton, a city of 95,000 residents, acutely faces issues of racial injustice and structural inequality—issues that largely haven’t touched USC. Many of Compton’s residents are either unemployed, poorly paid, or ineligible for government assistance. Upwards of 1 in 5 Comptonians live in poverty—double the nationwide average. Compton also happens to be home to the largest city-based guaranteed income pilot project in the country, The Compton Pledge. According to the Compton Pledge website, “Local housing assistance in Compton is at capacity, presenting unaffordable hardships for a city where 46% of residents are renters. In Compton, rates of unemployment have risen to 21.9% since the beginning of COVID-19, and a growing number of residents regularly rely on food pantries.”
Ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and local governments and private nonprofits are still trying to deliver on its promise. Ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and we still haven’t achieved his promise of “Freedom From Want.” Because ninety years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, America can’t even deliver on freedom from need.
And what we need, of course, a mall can’t give us.
A small portion of this essay originally appeared in Lenny Letter.
Additional fact checking by Apoorva Tadepalli.
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