Shake Shack is the future of luxe consumption, not Chipotle
Evidence for the rise of luxe consumption is often found in the rise of Chipotle and the decline of McDonald's, but perhaps that's just the early warning shot. Chipotle's food isn't objectively great. Shake Shack's is, though, so maybe their ascendancy might represent the real beginning of franchised luxe dining, where every burger tastes great, kind of like it does in Japan.
Of course, not every industry will have its Shake Shack. Creatives only reluctantly get into mass consumerism, but when it comes to food, efficiencies of scale do reduce costs in a meaningful way, and eating is a large part of our monthly budgeting, so I expect both chains and local restaurants to do well. Or perhaps there will just be a lot of local chains. Again, I hate to keep using my home town as an example (but it really is a prism by which to view up and down American), there are many local-only chains, such as P. Terry’s hamburgers and Alamo Drafthouse theaters, which both blur that line between local and corporate (as of today, P. Terry’s is at odds with permitting issues on Austin’s treasured South Congress Ave., and Alamo Drafthouse theaters are all over Texas and other parts of the U.S. now).
“Local” has lost a lot of its meaning, just like a lot of words at the dawn of the creative class. “Hipster” is another one. Every subculture that goes mainstream has to reach a post-modern-like death where all meaning is suspended. In the case of the co-opting of the hipster, every token on that subcultural Christmas tree has become just now flair that ordinary people do.
