Costco Haul Culture and Land Use, Courtyard Urbanist, Alicia Pederson, October 17, 2026
In a city, the neighborhood itself is your pantry. Grocers, bakeries, and pharmacies store things nearby until you need them, so you can live with a smaller kitchen, a smaller pantry, and a smaller refrigerator. Maybe you don’t even need a car and garage because it’s easier for you to walk to meet daily needs. In the suburbs, the stores are farther away, so it makes sense for households to buy in bulk and store things at home. The big house, the basement, the garage … all are compensating for missing neighborhood amenities. The suburbs relocate the warehouse from the merchant to your house.
This piece and the reaction to it reveal one of the core dynamics that urbanists run into: analyses of suburbia like this, which is pretty much accurate on a factual level, sound to suburbanites like either a judgment on their lifestyle choices, or an implication that they’re pawns or rubes whose behavior and choices are not real or chosen. And the assumption that such snobbery underlies urbanist ideas causes a lot of people to stop listening.
Pederson is right that suburban big-box stores and large houses shift the logistics of storage and delivery. There is a spatial logic in suburbia that is different from walkable neighborhoods, and obviously that does influence behavior.
However, big-box stores still exist in cities, and can still use economies of scale to offer lower prices than small retailers (whether or not this is something that is necessarily good for neighborhoods overall). And the variety of goods at big-box stores, and the ability to stock up on basics, might be a real convenience even aside from the logic that largely determines it as a pattern.
Not everybody wants to shop every day or two for fresh ingredients and decide what to cook. Lots of families are happy to use boxed and packaged products augmented with basic fresh ingredients. Some people love the delight of shopping, others find it a bore or a chore. Pederson strikes me as someone who genuinely loves urban life, but not everybody does, or would, even if they could experience it at its best.
Another laterally related issue here is e-commerce. Even in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, even without big-box retailers, Amazon is essentially a virtual big-box store with delivery so fast it’s functionally the same unless you need something immediately. So in a way, e-commerce has made the old Walmart vs. local retailer debate a little bit obsolete.
I’m curious about your thoughts.
H is for Hosting, Street Haunting, anandi mishra, October 17, 2026
What a lovely, bittersweet piece:
It’s been a while since we hosted; life (™) things have a tendency to get in the way. Some friends are scattered, others out of touch, but there’s a cache that sits close. Its’ the end of October and temperatures are already in single digits. Autumn dazzles outside the window. I don’t know when, but I know that soon I’ll be setting up the table in this cold, quiet neighbourhood. Then when I see my friends at the threshold of the apartment, unlace their boots, I will feel that tinge of teenage excitement. What a luxury that these people are my people, that we drifted into each other’s orbits! And for those tranquil few hours, we’ll once again be bound together by the warmth of a shared meal, a shared life.
The fact that adulthood and maturity seem to imply giving up joy, and the ways in which we have made this true in ways it does not have to be, is one of the things I think about a lot. Read the whole thing.
Have You Been to the Sixth-Worst McDonald’s in America?, Washingtonian, Sylvie McNamara, October 19, 2026
This is funny:
The consistent theme, as one reviewer put it, is that the Stafford McDonald’s “provides one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve seen.” The very young staff apparently “refuse to make eye contact even when they see you waiting to order” or they “hide in the back” despite that “they see you standing there.” Many reviewers describe employees ignoring long lines of customers, or acting “surprised that we actually wanted the food we had paid for,” or a manager listening to earbuds and pretending not to hear a request for help. One reviewer said that an aggressively idle employee was “either blitzed out of his mind or just didn’t have a single care in the world.”
However, the authors went out to try the McDonald’s, and found it just fine. They asked a couple of the kids about the store’s reputation and they explained why that might be:
I told him that to be honest, that environment sounded kind of fun.
Of course it is, he said—but therein lies the problem. To his exuberant and youthful colleagues, “work is a social thing.” Half the crew is high schoolers, and even the non–high schoolers are young. “We’re all too comfortable with each other. We feel like we can get away with certain stuff” because the manager is “our friend,” not “a random person who’s gonna write you up.” The experience I had that evening was anomalous, he suggested. “We got the right team tonight. Everyone is locked in.”
This reminds me of something I read years ago about an old pancake house, where someone said they used to work there and at the end of the shift they poured pancake batter over the entire flattop to see if they could cook and flip a gigantic pancake. This would have been in the 1960s. I guess it seems usual to encounter kids working today, but lots of places like that were basically staffed by kids. It’s one of these things where I wonder whether we’re seeing a decline in standards, or an increase in expectations. Those are not the same thing.
Preserved to Death, Southern Urbanism, Jaime J. Izurieta, October 20, 2026
Real preservation is not a regulatory framework. It’s a culture of building, a mindset, and a way of understanding why new ideas need old buildings. What we want to preserve is what happens in the city when the energy from the buildings inspires us to solve problems, innovate, and build. Not the carcasses of buildings, but the ideas and values that got those buildings built in the first place.
Yes. Read the whole thing.
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