Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 56
The sad desk salad moves to the suburbs, Facebook is the worst, Afghanistan, Larry David, Recipe Corner, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
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The Sad Desk Salad Is Migrating From the Office to the Suburbs
After the pandemic slashed sales, salad chains found ways to meet their customers closer to home.
The past year, in order to pay for my upcoming wedding, I have refused to buy coffee, and I’ve been especially mindful to pack my lunch at home every day. That being said, I love a sad desk salad. I love all the fresh salad chains: Salada, Sweetgreen, Mad Greens, Cava, etc. This list goes on, and I am a sucker for every $18 salad. I am not alone.
Before Covid-19 turned the American office worker into an endangered species, there were few more ubiquitous markers of this particular population than the office desk salad.
Once the province of city-center delis, salads became a fixture for those who didn’t have time for a lunch break but could shell out $18 for a quick midday meal.
For years, this business model -- selling convenient, healthful permutations of meals served in bowls -- translated into double-digit location growth: 10.6% in 2018 and 12% in 2019, according to Datassential. Demand was not expected to slow.
But then the pandemic shuttered office buildings that fed the steady stream of customers through restaurant doors. Any business that relied on foot traffic suffered, and more than 110,000 restaurants in the U.S. closed permanently or long-term between March and December 2020, according to the National Restaurant Association. With the rise of work-from-home, the salad chains should have been doomed.
And yet, the desk salad is not only alive and well -- it is thriving. Despite meager 1.8% unit growth in 2020, the “limited-service salads / healthful” segment was the best performing of the entire restaurant industry by that metric, according to estimates from Datassential. Though office workers fled big cities, their lunch habits eventually resumed. And even as they do slowly return to the city, and rearrange their lives once again, the salad remains.
“The desk salad is a home desk salad now,” said Chopt chief executive officer Nick Marsh.
The salad chains are now looking beyond their once-core demographic.
Chopt will open 40 more restaurants in the next two years, Marsh said, with 80% in the suburbs. In April, the Mediterranean chain Cava, a more suburban brand, announced it had raised $190 million to support its expansion. Just Salad, which closed an approximately $20 million funding round in July, said it will double its location count in the next two years, with an emphasis on the suburbs. In July, the New York Times reported on Sweetgreen’s own suburban expansion; the chain filed confidentially for an IPO in June.
The persistence of the desk salad, despite the geographic dislocation of its primary customer base, is at least partly attributable to the segment’s quick pivot to Covid-friendly delivery methods.
“About one-third of Salad / Healthful restaurant locations offered delivery in June 2020, but that percentage grew to more than three quarters of locations by the end of the year,” said Mark Brandau of Datassential.
Without being tethered to the city office worker, salad chains are no longer just selling lunch.
“In the suburbs, we’re 60/40 lunch/dinner,” said Chopt’s Marsh. Just Salad’s dinner sales went from about 25% of its bottom line to nearly 40%, said Kenner. Dig sees dinner as a key to its success with the suburban consumer, too, said Eskin.
That’s not to say there aren’t headwinds, even in the suburbs: Cooking at home remains elevated compared to 2019. “In our most recent survey, in May, 78% of consumers said they intended to cook as much or more even as things get back to normal,” said McCormick’s chief executive officer Lawrence Kurzius in an interview. (The salad chains are capitalizing on that, too: Chopt now sells bottled dressings and Cava has a line of dips and spreads, including harissa and a jalapeno-infused feta.)
And then there’s the expense.
The already hefty price tag only gets higher when you add delivery fees and tips, not to mention inflation. On one mid-pandemic order from Sweetgreen, a $15.45 kale Caesar salad with steelhead salmon came with $10.86 in “other” fees, including tax, a service fee, a delivery fee and tip. Yet, consumers don’t seem to be blinking.
“The core consumer for a fast-casual salad chain is probably not so price-sensitive,” said Datassential’s Brandau. The combination of the health-halo from the salad with possibly fewer restaurant visits total thanks to working from home means that a $26 salad is within the realm of the acceptable for white-collar workers.
“Do you ‘make it count’ and have a salad, rather than trade down to a combo meal at a fast-food restaurant?” Brandau asks. “That’s what a salad-focused fast-casual chain is probably thinking.”
Pardon me, but I’m gonna go stand in line for an $18 salad now. I’ll be back online in 30.
Facebook is the worst
How’s this for a Saturday night news dump?
Facebook said Saturday evening that an article raising concerns that the coronavirus vaccine could lead to death was the top performing link in the United States on its platform from January through March of this year, acknowledging the widespread reach of such material for the first time.
It also said another site that pushed covid-19 misinformation was also among the top 20 most visited pages on the platform.
So what was the top article on Facebook?
The article that surged earlier this year on Facebook’s platform, which is used by more than 2.8 billion people each month, was a factual article from The South Florida Sun Sentinel (distributed by the Chicago Tribune) about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigating the death of a doctor who passed away two weeks after taking the coronavirus vaccine, according to the report (Months later, the medical examiner’s office found that there wasn’t enough evidence to say whether the vaccine played a role in the doctor’s death).
This leads us to…
Tweet of the Week
Afghanistan
Look, I’m not even gonna start to pretend that I understand 1% of the dynamics in play in Afghanistan. That said, I saw a couple of pieces this week that I found interesting. And needless to say, quite troubling.
Lede of the Week
From This Is Not the Taliban 2.0:
When the Taliban first sacked Kabul 25 years ago, the group declared that it was not out for revenge, instead offering amnesty to anyone who had worked for the former government. “Taliban will not take revenge,” a Taliban commander said then. “We have no personal rancor.” At the time of that promise, the ousted president, Mohammad Najibullah, was unavailable for comment. The Taliban had castrated him and, according to some reports, stuffed his severed genitals in his mouth, and soon after, he was strung up from a lamppost.
Oh boy. More from the piece:
The leaders of the Taliban show no sign of mellowing. Why would they? For the past 15 years, they have been unremittingly violent, and for this pitilessness they have only been rewarded. They played at negotiating, but dishonestly, and only to accept the terms of American surrender. Moreover, the current generation of leaders is simply meaner than its predecessors, and in some cases hardened by time in Guantánamo Bay. The first generation of Taliban focused on overcoming its Afghan rivals. This one has taken on those rivals—and NATO—and has now won decisively. An Afghan in Kabul who knows senior Taliban told me they are “much more strict, much more hard-line.”
“They came into the city as a victorious Islamic army,” he said, “and of course they will act that way,” and treat their success as a reward from God for having shown no mercy.
The author, a staff writer for the Atlantic who is also a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale, doesn’t paint a very rosy picture of what’s to come.
That is what it does best. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan 20 years ago, it implemented a program of startling simplicity: in domestic policy, a law-and-order government according to an interpretation of Islamic law alien to modern conceptions of human rights; and in foreign policy, extension of hospitality to Sunni jihadists of all nationalities and persuasions. It claims to have chilled out. But its actions suggest that nothing has really changed, and the Taliban will turn Afghanistan into a place just as miserable for its people, and for the rest of the world, as it ever was. And the United States has all but announced that we are willing to let that happen.
Taliban’s road ahead
We are being told that the Taliban of today are not the same as the Taliban of 1996. Fair enough, but the Afghanistan of today is not the same as the Afghanistan of 1996 either. The Taliban were able to capture the country with more ease than anyone imagined, and certainly more ease than in 1996. But now that the war has ended, as their spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid announced in his maiden press conference on Tuesday, the real job of running the country begins. And this is not as simple as it may sound.
In 1996, Afghanistan was a country destroyed almost completely by years of civil war. Its infrastructure was wrecked, the dams were idle, roads chewed up, cities bombed largely into rubble, its central bank defunct for years and its national currency — the Afghani — left without any monetary authority to back it up. At least four separate currencies circulated in parallel as media of exchange in Afghanistan back in 1996, depending on the region. Its economy was largely run by smugglers and racketeers and no fixed investment worth mentioning was operated anywhere in the country. Less than a million students were enrolled in schools, mostly males, and hardly any higher education system was running.
By contrast, the Afghanistan they have captured so easily today had $9 billion in foreign exchange reserves (all held outside the country), public-sector enterprises, a functioning central bank and financial system to curate the money supply and exchange rate and process cross-border payments, 2,000 kilometres of roads connecting all major provincial cities, four long-distance transmission lines that carry the vast majority of the country’s electricity from neighbouring countries (Afghanistan purchases electricity from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran via transmission lines laid down during the period of US occupation), 10m students in schools and universities and so on.
The US-installed government was notorious for its corruption and inability to build institutions, but despite these failings, what the Taliban have captured today is far more functional and developed compared to what they captured back in 1996. They have made it clear that they do not wish to dismantle whatever rudimentary skeleton of a state the Americans built. In his press conference on Tuesday, Mujahid also said “we want a modern economy” and urged those Afghans seeking to flee the country to stay. “We need your talents,” he said.
Ok. So there’s a lot going on. This next paragraph contains some of the craziest details I’ve seen.
In order to run the country they will need engineers, doctors, teachers, administrators and bureaucrats. Consider for example that since rolling into Kabul, they are said to have gone to the offices of the country’s central bank, whose head had flown out on Sunday night, asking to be taken to where the $9bn foreign exchange reserves are kept. It had to be explained to them that reserves are not held in cash in a vault in the basement of the central bank’s headquarters. They are held mostly in various instruments with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and have been frozen by the Biden administration. The central bank governor, who had left, had to clarify this in a series of tweets on Wednesday.
In time they will learn that more than half of the resources required to operate the new state that is now theirs to run are met by donor countries that are announcing a suspension of these aid flows one by one. Without these resources they cannot pay government salaries, especially those of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF). They will learn that without a functional financial system, without a central bank, and without foreign exchange reserves, they cannot make the payments on the electricity they import from their neighbours. Then they will discover the massive debt-servicing obligations of the state they have just captured, and the freezing of the $7bn in programmed donor support for 2021.
How About Some Good News?
Curb is back in October? Pretty, pretty good.
Larry David ‘screamed’ at Alan Dershowitz at grocery store over Trump ties
Try to reach this exchange below without hearing the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme.
Dershowitz: “We can still talk, Larry.”
David: “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around [former Trump Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo! It’s disgusting!”
Dersh: “He’s my former student [at Harvard Law]. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students?”
David: “It’s disgusting. Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”
Added the stunned source, “Larry walks away. Alan takes off his T-shirt to reveal another T-shirt [underneath it] that says, ‘It’s The Constitution Stupid!’.”
Shouts to Page 6 for the following detail:
We’re told Dersh “drove off in an old, dirty Volvo.”
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
More below.
Recipe Corner
In honor of the sad desk salad, this week we’re going meatless. It’s fresh salad szn, fam.
Tomato Caesar
Let’s start with a salad this week. A tomato salad. It’s time.
3 oil-packed anchovy fillets
1 small garlic clove
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 Tbsp. mayonnaise
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
2 Tbsp. finely grated Parmesan, plus shaved for serving
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
1½ lb. mixed tomatoes, sliced, quartered, or halved
½ cup basil leaves
Purée anchovies, garlic, oil, lemon juice, mayonnaise, mustard, and 2 Tbsp. Parmesan in a blender until smooth. Season dressing with salt and pepper. (Or, finely chop anchovies and garlic and whisk together dressing in a medium bowl.)
Arrange tomatoes on a large plate; drizzle dressing over. Top with basil and shaved Parmesan; season generously with pepper.
Fresh Summer Peach Salad
1 Thai chile pepper, minced (seeded if desired)
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup fresh lime juice (from 2 limes)
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
1 medium shallot, thinly sliced (about 1/4 cup)
1 pound peeled seedless watermelon, cut into 1/4-inch-thick matchsticks (about 3 cups)
Flesh of 1 ripe mango, cut into 1/4-inch-thick matchsticks (about 1 cup)
2 medium peaches, pitted and cut into 1/4-inch-thick matchsticks or thin wedges (about 2 cups)
1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded and cut into 1/4-inch-thick matchsticks (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/2 cup fresh Thai basil leaves
1/2 cup fresh mint leaves
1/2 cup chopped, dry-roasted unsalted peanuts, for garnish
Whisk together the chile pepper, garlic, lime juice, fish sauce, oil, brown sugar and shallot in a large mixing bowl until combined. Reserve 1/2 cup of the vinaigrette separately.
Add the watermelon, mango, peaches, cucumber, Thai basil and mint to the bowl with most of the dressing; gently toss to coat. Scatter the peanuts over the surface of the salad and serve right away along with the reserved dressing.
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