If you want to know what’s in my head at any given time, it’s probably the 2-minute mark of “Walkin,” where the trap beat drops, the hook falls in line, and Denzel Curry rhapsodizes, slow and solid, about managing life under capitalism. Sitting on the same yawny vocals that run throughout the track, that moment kind of opens you up and pulls at you from inside. Watch the desert video if you can handle even more heat (nevermind the rest of the album).

Now that, what, blooms are blooming? Mask mandates are falling? Sweetgreen has started emailing incessantly with hard-hitting updates on special free delivery and a new spring menu.

Let me say it for us all: “Haven’t thought about them in a while.” And if, for you, that thought is accompanied by an idle curiosity about how they’re doing these days, let me answer like this: Sweetgreen has just opened their first drive-through.

Looks like all those AI salads or whatever were a cute figment of boom time, and now they’ve got to do what’s good for business: venture more than 300 yards from Barry’s Bootcamp. Find Sweetgreen’s first car restaurant in Schaumburg, Illinois, where a fishbowl window still lets you watch the people making salads from your car in the “Sweetlane” (which is… not the same dynamic as an open kitchen in-store), though who’s to say whether those salads will be yours, since you will have ordered in advance through their app. Then you’ll drive it back to your… home? Office? Where do people go now? Assuming this place does well, dozens more are coming in the stretch ahead — Sweetgreen currently operates 150 stores and they’re looking to make it 1,000 by 2030 (and somewhere in there is a thought of finally becoming profitable). It’s a whole new lunchroom vibe: “OF COURSE you can sit with us what’s your name again?”

Direct-to-consumer internet brands, which have always “passed on the savings to you by cutting out the middleman,” are suddenly finding an awkward man in the middle and his name is Mark Zuckerberg. According to the NYT, social ads have gotten so expensive that it’s starting to be cheaper for brands to open up physical stores than it is to target people on instagram. (The walk-by: the original scroll!) And it’s not just Allbirds and whoever else has a billion VC dollars. Brands you’ve never heard of are getting spaces formerly occupied by, like, Tourneau.

That’s not to say that everyone can afford a lease up-front — some brands are signing revenue share deals with landlords to offset whatever initial cash they’re missing. And for your purposes, that’s a model that’s also breathing new life into thrifting. Instead of making you struggle with hashtags on Depop, a physical store called ReDress will give you rack space in exchange for 15% of whatever you sell. That’s great for your clothes, but more importantly, you love to see folks subvert the old lease model — squint real hard and it’s a barter economy.

To unite the scroll and the good old days, let’s throw our weight over to Pease Porridge Press, an online vintage bookshop that’s making just the purest use of instagram. Say you have a hazy memory of some long-lost children’s book, and now you *need* to figure out what it was. Send a description their way and they’ll crowdsource the details. Some recent quandaries:

“A book I read in the 60s with a male babysitter who made soda come out of the water taps!” ; “A family that took in strangers when no one else would and they ended up being foxes” ; and “A picture book about two people who had a big garden, and they were really big people who wore billowy jumpsuits. I think they grew cabbages?”

All these mysteries are either solved or on their way, thanks to an active group of book nerds with strong memories. How’s that for a retail concept?