News

Sorry to hear that Togo’s has been enshittified.

I think that Doctorow was referring not to just something undesirable happening at a company with that, but specifically the transition of a consumer-facing Internet company from the growth phase to the monetization phase.

I don't think that Togo's was trying to rapidly grow while losing money and then shifted to try to make money, a la what he was talking about. I would guess that there are one of three things going on:

• They (and other food places) have minimum-wage labor as a major chunk of their costs, and so they're preparing for the imminent increase by cutting how much labor they need and automating what they can. My guess is that this is probably the dominant factor, given the change that California is about to see.

• There's been a lot of inflation. My understanding is that wages tend to be more sticky than inflation -- this guy who started chatting with me at the counter in my above comment said that he only saw a 5% raise last time around, whereas last year saw something like 10% inflation -- so I'm guessing that if inflation spikes, you tend to have a period where people are spending less, and it may be that prepared food is an easy thing to reduce spending on. That'd mean that they'd have a rough time in an inflationary environment. Although...hmm. If it's an inexpensive restaurant, it might benefit, because one might see more people shift from more-expensive options to inexpensive options. Giffen goods aren't exactly the same thing, but work on that sort of principle -- an increase in cost can increase consumption because of substitution effect for a more-expensive alternative dominating.

• Automation has just been getting cheaper/better, and has finally reached the point of working well enough that it can replace human workers at point-of-sale. I remember when supermarket automated checkouts were just a complete disaster, took way longer to slog through than a human checker. Now, while I'll take a human checker if available, I don't avoid automated checkouts like the plague any more.

My go-to was an egg salad hero with tabbouleh on it.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll already grabbed my food this time, but give it a shot next time around.

EDIT: Nah, apparently it's gone. I asked a worker, and they said that they did offer it at one point, but egg salad was discontinued. Ah, well. I guess it might relate to the very-elevated prices for eggs during the avian flu problems recently. Maybe if egg prices come back down...