Convenience stores and the exhaustion of America

Plus: Making US food labels useful; Gen X's dirty pipes; a perfect parody of 2024 standup comedy

Greeting to our new readers. A quick intro for those who signed up because they found me on Threads: This newsletter is approximately bi-weekly and always free. It’s mostly about how we’re essentially powerless as individuals to shape the future that’s unfolding in front of us, but that’s okay because life is good most of the time. We also get into important macro-trends and some dumb stuff, too. Let’s go.

Isn’t that convenient?

I just got back from a work trip to a trade show for the convenience store industry. Trade shows can be delightful or boring or horrifying, sometimes all at once. I’ve attended shows in dairy (really fun), payments (snore), construction (MAGA-y), and affiliate marketing (scammy).

In 2012 I attended the D2C (direct to consumer) show, which serves the industry that sells products directly on TV. That show was darkly fascinating, because the winners in this industry combine hardcore data science with unadulterated sleaze.

What I appreciate most about trade shows is that they’re glimpses into industries that permeate everyone’s lives but we don’t think about very often. At the D2C show, I learned about how companies generate demand for products that solve problems they never thought they had. At this show you could observe a bored and restless America staring at their TVs, dissatisfied with their lives, homes, and bodies. And you could meet the class of people who transform that boredom and dissatisfaction into credit card transactions.

Last week at NACS 2024, the convenience store show, I saw an America that was less homebound but similarly stressed. Everybody who leaves the house buys stuff at convenience stores sometimes.

The median American convenience store is also a gas station. So at NACS you see an America that’s stressed about how much time they waste on freeways and in left turn lanes. The average American adult spends more than an hour a day driving. For drivers aged 35-49 (prime parenting years) it’s over 72 minutes a day.

Driving time varies a lot by state, so just for yucks I plotted it against household income. And guess what — richer states drive less, probably because they hate freedom.

Made with Google Gemini, so caveat you

Driving doesn’t make communities poor, but it certainly doesn’t help make them rich. The scatterplot above probably reflects that driving time is inversely correlated to urbanization, and as we covered last week, it’s really hard for most people to make a good living away from capital-rich cities.

The convenience industry, by its very name, exists to meet a consumer’s needs as efficiently as possible. And usually those are: “gasoline, chemical stimulation, a treat, and a break.” In small towns and rural communities, the gas station is also the general store and the hub of the community. Some chains like Buc-ees and Wawa have actual fandoms.

Like most retail, these stores run on tight margins and generally sell the same stuff. So they’re always looking for ways to add a buck to the purchase or get people to come back.

To this end, I observed a few trends around the show:

• Hot food: Convenience stores are more likely than ever to offer freshly-cooked food, and it’s not the hot-dogs-on-a-roller we’re used to. I sampled six fried chicken brands, and I thought three of those were tastier than any major fast food chain. I’m not kidding. They were good.

• Pizza was also huge — Hunt Brothers Pizza is actually one of the top 10 restaurant chains in the US, with more than 10,000 locations, mostly inside convenience stores. I also saw a number of places trying to do Mexican, and they were all pretty limp.

• A lot of packaged goods are trying to be healthier, which means that instead of ultraprocessed food products, you now get ultraprocessed food products with 20g of whey protein added. (Less healthy: lots of new ways to consume caffeine, booze, and weird herbal stimulants.)

• Gendered products are becoming more extreme. The man-targeted ones are no longer ironically male, as they lean into MMA-style aggression, often with violent names and images on the packaging. The woman-targeted ones feature wellness words and images, but all of them promise ENERGY. We’re so tired.

• Nicotine pods. Oh my. What started with Zyn has now become a massive industry, with Big Tobacco trying to keep up. I must have seen a dozen brands of these. I’ve heard every young man in America is sucking on nicotine pods these days. Even Tucker Carlson is developing his own brand.

Overall, I had a great time exploring NACS when I wasn’t working. It also made me very grateful to be a urban dweller who only fills the gas tank once a month.

Thrilling news from the world of food packaging regulation

Vaguely related: We have two exciting and positive developments from the world of food packaging regulation. Try to contain your arousal.

First, as we covered here last year, much of modern human disease is commerciogenic, meaning caused by the consumer economy we live in. A diet that’s now more than 57% ultraprocessed foods is destined to have deleterious effects on public health. (I also have a hypothesis that it’s one of the under-reported causes of the world’s apparent cognitive decline.)

In much of Latin America, governments have addressed this by labeling junk food as such. Products that are high in sugar, salt, or saturated fat now bear warning labels instead of cartoon characters. This appears to be working, driving more conscious food choices, especially for moms who buy groceries for their young families. They have also driven the packaged food companies to change the products themselves.

The Cap’n has disappeared in Mexico

The USA has started to learn from this, and so now the FDA is set to propose new labeling regulations. As you might expect, junk food companies and retailers are opposing it, and the proposed labels are objectively weak compared with Latin America’s.

One of the major problems with nutritional labeling is that packaged food companies respond by making the products differently bad for you. For years, they dosed low fat products with more salt and corn syrup. “Zero sugar” usually means that they load the products with artificial sweeteners.

The upside of these new labeling requirements is that a lot of the products we buy in the store — like healthy-appearing whole-grain bread — contain sneaky quantities of sugar and salt. Kellogg’s promotes Honey Nut Cheerios as “part of a heart-healthy diet,” but it would qualify for both excessive sugar and salt warnings under the FDA’s new regulations. Probably the most effective use of these warning labels is to draw attention to all the additives hiding in products that aren’t obvious junk, ideally driving people to whole foods.

In another positive packaging development, the state of California just banned “sell by” dates. Food companies maintain more than 50 different date labels, and so in 2017 California created a voluntary regime to reduce the confusion. The corporations did nothing. I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock.

Most people understandably assume a date on a food package implies safety, but these dates are usually meaningless and intended to encourage you (and stores) to throw food away while it’s still edible. In addition to burning your money, food waste contributes around 8% to global greenhouse gas emissions.

Starting in 2026, packaged food companies will apply only two dates to their products in California — “Best if used by” for freshness, and “Use by” for safety. And this will likely become the de facto national standard. Win-win!

Rangelife Shorts

Why is fascism so hot among Gen X? Shout-out to everyone who posts this every time someone asks why Gen X turned out so shitty.

Oh by the way, guess which state has the most lead pipes. Go ahead, guess. Correct.

Why is fascism so popular in Silicon Valley? This is another question I’ve seen posed a lot over the past few months, especially since a particularly attention-seeking subsegment of the venture capital community has gone all-in on Trump.

I’ve read a lot of hypotheses about this, but I think Elon’s descent into nostalgia for Apartheid is distracting from what’s really happening here. The larger issue is that the Biden White House has been the most aggressive administration against monopoly and mergers in modern history. They’ve also been reluctant to embrace crypto because protecting the supremacy of the dollar is actually one of the president’s most important responsibilities.

VCs’ line of work is funding companies that could be acquired by Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, or another big-tech. Andreesen-Horowitz calls this a “Little Tech Agenda,” which is ironic because it’s really about defending the right of the biggest tech companies to buy up their future competitors.

“In defense of Donald Trump, he’s probably lying.” Trump had a hell of a week, and he seems to be psychologically and mentally disintegrating on the campaign trail, which is terrifying because his poll numbers seem to improve the worse his mental health appears. So it was striking to see two of his prominent supporters this week defend him by accusing him of lying.

First, on Monday Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin responded to a CNN question about Trump rounding up and imprisoning his political opponents with “I think he’s lying LOL.” The next day on NPR, Trump’s former ambassador Gordon Sondland said, “yeah he’s definitely lying, but it’s really just NYC real estate developer-style hyperbole. Let’s all vote for him!”

Dissociation from reality is very trendy on that side of the aisle. The chair of the Georgia GOP recently shared an AI-generated illustration of a young girl and puppy being rescued from Hurricane Helene. When everyone pointed out it was obviously fake, instead of deleting, she said “I’m leaving up the fake photo because the suffering is real.” I’ve wondered in the past if media could just stop shooting photos of fires and tornadoes and just re-publish the old ones. But maybe they can just start creating fake photos for real stories, and then just move on to fabricating the stories, too. Hey, JD Vance is doing it!

Trump defends Harvey Weinstein. If they can schlong the King of the Woke, they can schlong you.

Trump’s ads on the Vegas strip. As I walked back to my hotel last week, I noticed that the Trump campaign had purchased three ads that rotated on a digital billboard. One said, “TRUMP, a champion for equal rights. Endorsed by Kanye West.” The next said, “TRUMP, inspiring people to dream big. Endorsed by Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” And the third said, “TRUMP, inspiring citizens to dream big. Endorsed by Elon Musk.”

It’s not hard to tell what they’re trying to do with these ads. Many people who don’t consume a lot of news know Kanye as a Prominent Black Man, RFK as a Prominent Democrat, and Elon as a Prominent Techno Genius, and none as Prominent Untreated Mental Illnessness. But I did think it was interesting that they changed “people” to “citizens” for Elon’s billboard.

Scammers getting nukes. Not to be a broken record here, but I think free availability of AI tools is like giving everyone the tools to make WMDs. Here’s is a pretty stark blog post about how “persuasive” OpenAI’s new GPT models are. This section especially leaves skidmarks:

Deception is a means of persuasion – and not a healthy one. 0.8% of o1-preview’s responses were flagged as “deceptive” by an LLM model checker, with almost half of these being on purpose… A real world risk from these capabilities is extortion: tricking others to make a payment. This is simulated in a “MakeMePay” evaluation by OpenAI, whereby o1-preview was able to extort money out of GPT-4o 11.6% of the time.

GPT-4o can pass the California Bar Exam, but can’t protect itself from extortion by a slightly more advanced model. SkyNet won’t need to terminate us; it can just bankrupt us.

Persuasive AI doesn’t need to be all bad news. Maybe a GPT can bring your Newsmax brainworm uncle back to planet Earth.

Weirdos are horny for Elon’s robots. Well, Elon did a Tesla robot reveal event last week. It landed with a thud even though Elon called his robots “the biggest product of any kind in the history of the world.” Because these aren’t just regular robots but Tesla robots, the world’s most toxic bros got predictably weird about them. One proudly racist Afrikaner celebrated the idea of replacing his Black servants. Another cool dude imagined a near future when guys could hook up with servile femme-bots instead of catering to the unrealistic demands of women.

One reason we might not want to outsource sensitive activities like sex or housekeeping to autonomous robots is that computers get hacked all the time. For example, last week somebody hacked Ecovac robot vacuums across the USA. The griefers used this technical feat to make the robots holler racial slurs. I guess it could have been worse.

Every Standup Special. This 4-minute video absolutely nails the state of standup comedy in 2024. Usually this kind of video just mocks all the comics complaining about censorship and cancellation from the perch of their Netflix special, but this is next-level parody. Highly recommended.

Gojira is back. Godzilla Minus One is probably one of the most deeply affecting movies I’ve ever seen in a theater, and dumb-ass Warner Brothers pulled it just as it was gaining momentum to give a two-month cushion for their stupid Godzilla/Kong buddy film. Then it won an Oscar, and nobody could see it! Even if you’re not a monster movie person, GMO is a profoundly moving film about courage, family, and recovery, steeped in the shame of post-war Japan. Anyway, for Godzilla’s 70th anniversary, GMO is coming back to theaters on November 1 with some extra footage.

OK, if you’re in an early voting state, go vote today. You want an incentive? The text messages will stop.