Guys, the playlist is so good! (For anyone who missed it, we opened up a collaborative one so you can all share with each other.) Rusty himself contributed, which we’ll take as a consecration, and everyone else has shown up in predictably fashionable form. You can still add your songs and I encourage you to, especially if you’re sitting a bit of reggaeton (just a personal desire, all genres welcome). Either way, happy listening 💕

I distinctly remember knocking Goldbelly’s indulgent nonsense in 2018, but joke’s on me, we all love it! Why shouldn’t you be able to summon a single, dry-ice-packed slice of Lox from Russ & Daughters to your home in Denver? (Have it your way, right?) Just a few years later, the company is setting up shop on QVC so the greedy masses can feast our eyes before we get funneled into Goldbelly’s paying-customer channel. “If you watch food TV, you might fall in love with a dish you see, but you can’t get it. That makes no sense,” said the Goldbelly founder. I would argue that actually does make sense, because it’s uh TV and you can’t eat your screen (I’ve personally made peace with the fact that I will never taste the perfect cartoon pizza on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Anyway if you want to know who’s sold out to make this capitalist dream a reality, Cat Cora, Daniel Boulud, and Guy Fieri have all signed on to blab us through cooking demos and product spots, which really makes you wonder if we’re contractually allowed to reference Flavortown — perhaps the most compelling reason to tune in.

I know you’re jonesing for one more way to scrape revenue off the food biz, and “not paying people” seems to be a winning strategy. Moving us along into the salary-less future, early-aughts supervillain Starbucks has teamed up with modern-day supervillain Amazon to set up a cashierless coffee shop on the Upper East Side. With the Kentucky-Derby-worthy name, “Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go,” the store lets you pay for your coffee with a hassle-free biometric palm scan and possibly by extension the electromagnetic thought patterns of your firstborn. The most encouraging news here is that they’re adding more locations and #2 is slotted to show up on the ground floor of the New York Times, a company I would have expected to understand the term “virtue signaling.” (I know this isn’t necessarily how commercial real estate works but this looks a little like those fossil fuel ads come to life.)

Close your palm, turn off your TV, and hit the shops like an old-fashioned lady. I plan to do all my glitzy gifting this week at my friend Katherine Lewin’s new store, Big Night! She’s been queen of the snazzy dinner party for eons now (she stepped down as editorial boss at The Infatuation to open up shop) and her little outpost in Greenpoint is a hearty tap into her well of grace and charm. She’s got sexy salt and sauces and chocolate and cheese, the world’s most attractive glasses and cake stands, and, capping off many offers to the tune of, “I’ll search Craigslist for you!” she stocks vintage pieces that she’s found from, you know, around. Make a point of stopping in if you’re local.

Speaking of sharing our gifts, I’d also suggest swinging by Brooklyn Tea on Nostrand, which is run by a tea sommelier (!) and his partner. And for anyone further afield, Food52, the world’s purest content-commerce play, has you pretty universally covered on everything from Bronx-based potters to their own line of community-workshopped kitchen tools (their cutting board holds your phone up for recipe glancing, what a gift).