I Miss The World Trade Center Taco Bell
That's all.
I’m a NYC native. I grew up in the outer boroughs, my family is still there, etc. etc. I’m also 39 and old enough to have lived through a whole bunch of different iterations of NYC.
Anyway, I went to Stuyvesant High School in Tribeca. My friends and I would cut class regularly and go to the World Trade Center concourse because it had a Borders and a Taco Bell. Again, we were teenagers.
The Taco Bell inside the World Trade Center wasn’t a full-size restaurant or food court station. It was this weird “Taco Bell Express” cart with a handful of menu items located right outside the massive escalators that would take you down to the PATH and the subway.
As far as I can tell, the Taco Bell Express cart in the World Trade Center disappeared in the internet’s memory hole and there are no pictures of it or webpages describing it. Maybe it never existed.
And RIP Century 21. Thank you for making me look good at all those job interviews when I was young and broke.
Anyway, retail history blog Labelscar has some really good pictures of the World Trade Center concourse mall in the 1980s/1990s. Check it out.
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The Big Picture
Non-Americans from across the political spectrum go to Reddit to share what they think of the USA in 2020.
McDonalds is facing a lawsuit for allegedly steering black franchise owners towards stores in poor neighborhoods.
An argument that End of History author Francis Fukuyama was right all along.
Jason Wright, who as president of the newly renamed Washington Football Team has the Shittiest Job Noone Wants In Sports (TM), spoke with Politico about what the 2020 NFL season will be like. COVID football sounds really weird and not as fun to watch and confusing for fans, which honestly sounds right on brand for 2020.
Marketing/Advertising/PR
Spirit Airlines is expanding their loyalty program to target customers with low credit scores.
Have to admit this one is clever: A group of Russians allegedly started a fake political news website called Peace Data and then hired unsuspecting freelancers in the US & UK to write content for them. The site is tied to a disinformation campaign targeting left-leaning voters in English-speaking countries and Peace Data’s team reportedly paid writers promptly, which almost never happens.
Really smart piece by Lindsay Rittenhouse in Ad Age about big pharma advertising and marketing as a safe harbor for creative talent in a year where the in-house AND agency layoffs just won’t stop.
Ryan Reynolds’ Aviation Gin is going for an OnlyFans-themed ad campaign.
Media
Speaking of OnlyFans, the adult-oriented creator platform is now facing a creator revolt over rising service fees. Going past the porn jokes, there’s a genuinely real phenomenon here: Platforms making money from taking a cut of every transaction, but creators increasingly having their pick of platforms to choose from.
Continuing the platform theme, Medium is introducing newsletter functionality and detailed profile pages which sure sound like they could function as defacto home pages for writers/essayists. Really curious to see how this goes as Tumblr entered the sweet embrace of feature stasis when Verizon acquired them.
Lisa Hanawalt, creator of the FUCKING AWESOME Tuca & Bertie, talks with Wired about what it’s like for Netflix’s algorithm to cancel you.
Stacksear.ch is an experimental search engine of Substack newsletters.
Tech
Cory Doctorow on how Intuit killed the IRS’ attempts to simplify tax filing.
Antonio-Garcia Martinez on how the legacy of open-source software clashes with hypercapitalism in the modern tech industry.
Existential question: When Google is the only search engine most people use, what happens when Google autocomplete can sway the Presidential election?
Fun
Relevant to my life of loving the beach and living in Chicago: Lake Michigan Thinks It’s An Ocean.
Australian national treasure Ann Reardon of How To Cook That explains how viral video and clickbait sites work.
That’s it for this issue. I’d love to hear what you think and please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with advertising/PR agencies and in-house clients. He worked as a journalist in a previous life. Neal’s newsletter focuses on marketing, media and communications news.
Follow Neal on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn and learn more about his services at nealungerleider.com. You can contact him at neal@nealungerleider.com.
Taco Bell returning :)
https://www.westfield.com/westfieldworldtradecenter/restaurant/Taco-Bell-Cantina/75334
"A Taco Bell "Cantina" features an urban restaurant design, open kitchen, custom menu with shareable appetizers and alcoholic beverages. Yes, you read that right. A Taco Bell with beer, wine, sangria and twisted Freezes."