Rubirosa, Dodgeball & The Unraveling Of Our Local Neighborhoods (Cafe Society Dinner Discussion #13)
The neighborhood community bundle kept CAC low, LTV high for local business & in return you got community. Not anymore.
Cafe Society is Maxwell Social’s weekly magazine on the intersection of community and society — an anthropological look at the underpinnings of what makes the world tick, written by David Litwak (@dlitwak) and the Maxwell team.
I had been working and marinating on this essay for four months when I saw this tweet last week from Scott Belsky:
I’ve been obsessed with this idea of the degrading local community, and how to fix it, for a while now — and today we’re going to discuss it.
For the past 30+ years we’ve been systematically unbundling community from our day to day in-person interactions in our metropolitan areas, and COVID is merely finishing the job. As a result brands are responding to the loss of a local customer base either by cultivating a global community through tools like Instagram, Goldbelly and Doordash to pick up the slack for business the local community is no longer providing, or ceding ground to chain stores and disappearing entirely, and customers are left searching for how to get the community that was previously included for free.
Let’s get started.
David (@dlitwak) & The Maxwell Team