Cottagecore Wars

Are millennials okay? Plus, a new IRL User Experience review.

Dec 05, 2022

This week’s image is my son’s self portrait and my default mood

The Girlbosses of Green Gables

Can I interest you in a plaid napkin for $82? What about a dog-shaped piece of wood ($55) or perhaps brown rubber shoes for $62? No? Then who is buying this shit? Aren’t we in a recession?

These “cottage-inspired” stores in Brooklyn are the kind of disposable-income toilets that I find more offensive than all the Kardashians’ Gulfstreams put together.

There’s The Six Bells in Cobble Hill: Audrey Gelman’s second act after The Wing flew too close to the sun, and the elder Salter House, which you better believe carries country-cozy nightgowns.

The best part is their beef in Bococa. Here’s my favorite excerpt from a recent New York profile on Salter:

“…imitators have begun popping up. ‘There’s definitely been times where I felt like I’ve seen something styled in a way that felt like it had been copied from us.’ (Sandeep Salter) said…She does not name it, but an example might be the Six Bells...For those watching the mid-Brooklyn retail landscape, it look(s) suspiciously Salter House inspired. I asked Salter what she thought about Gelman’s store and her face tightened. ‘It was jarring,’ she said carefully. ‘And I know her personally, so … yeah.’”

LOL @ “jarring imitators.”

I can settle this: Salter’s whole vibe is colonial farm museum, which you barely need to go as far as Westchester to rip off easily. Six Bells went in a different direction: Full Minnesota mom meets a Ye Olde Fudge & Gift Shoppe.

I’m just worried about all the fiddle leaf figs from 2016. Surely all those “It plants” of yore are neglected and dying now that these two trailblazing retailers are making quilts happen.

Leave me alone, Tech. I get on my own nerves.

I suppose now’s a good time to mention I love IKEA. Specifically, its “Marketplace” where you can buy Christmas napkins for $3.99. Cloth ones.

They recently rolled out self-checkout at the Red Hook location, so I took it for a spin.

First thing I noticed was my big face staring back at me on a giant monitor above the scanner — accompanied by a flashing red caption that said something like, “YOU ARE BEING WATCHED BY OUR SECURITY TEAM AND THIS IS ALSO BEING RECORDED SO DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT GANKING THOSE PLAID NAPKINS.”

Fine. Watch me. Once I was scanning my Marketplace treasures with the confidence of a preschooler on a “My First Retail Register” toy, I was approached by a man asking me if I had an IKEA Family Card. I stopped scanning to talk to him about the benefits of this exclusive card, then the screen started yelling at me:

“YOU STOPPED SCANNING YOUR ITEMS. DO YOU NEED MORE TIME? YOUR ENTIRE ORDER IS GOING AWAY IN THREE SECONDS AND WE’RE SENDING A SECURITY GUARD TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE NOT GANKING NAPKINS.”

So I waved off the poor human trying to tell me about my discount and said, “Yes! Fine! I’ll take a card!”

“Great. Do you need help signing up for the card?”

“TWO MORE SECONDS, BITCH.”

“Yes! Sure.”

So now I’m sweating, making sure I’m scanning at a pace that won’t get me hauled into some SEKURITEE room with an INTEROGASHUN light, when another helpful team member approaches me.

“I heard you needed help signing up for our Family Card.”

She quickly pointed to a button on the screen that I could press toward the end of my purchase. I guess the first guy wasn’t trained on the point-to-the-button part of the sales pitch. I was able to nod and wave her away without breaking my scan pace and going to JAÏLL.

Then the third and final team member moseyed on over. A real bad cop in a bright yellow vest.

“You remembered to scan that big rug, didn’t you?”

“Yep. It’s the first thing I scanned.” I said as I grabbed one of those amazing blue tarp bags from a fresh stack that was all neatly folded like paper.

“You have to pay for the bag too.”

Of all the flashing messages, they couldn’t include one that reminds you to scan your bags.

“Oh, right. I’ll do a separate purchase.”

“The people behind you need to get by and your big rug is in the way.”

“WELL THE PEOPLE BEHIND ME NEED TO WAIT.”

And this my friends is how a Karen is born.

The best part is Bad Cop watched me scan the bag, put the $1.29 charge on my card, and stood there with me when the security monitor said, “YOU’VE BEEN RANDOMLY SELECTED FOR A PHYSICAL CHECK OF YOUR PURCHASES.”

Now I’m almost in tears: “What does that mean? What’s a physical check?”

Bad Cop: “I need to check your receipt to make sure you paid for everything.”

“The first receipt or the second one?”

“The second one.”

“The one for the single bag?”

“Yes.”

“That you just watched me buy?”

“Yes.”

What a stupid implementation of “tech” to “streamline” brick and mortar retail. This seemingly helpful interface required three entire humans stopping by, plus a cadre of dark ops security people watching from their war room. How is this better and quicker than one human being and a regular register?

Tech should be easy and friendly and do its job behind the scenes (empathetic design, helpful copy, and lots of user testing before launch) so there is no way you can use it improperly. The IKEA machine was impatient, unfriendly, and I think it was making fun of me.

In their presumed quest to cut costs, IKEA passed those costs along to the consumer by expanding the friction and stress of their checkout experience. And based on how many people it took to successfully get me out the door, it doesn’t seem like they lowered their head-count. I give them zero umlauts out of 1,000 on this one. (For reference, their Virgil Abloh chair gets two umlauts.)

I’m writing a book

I’m actually writing several at all times and there’s no sign of any of them being finished, so maybe you can help with this one:

Long after the career defining success of How To Not Murder Your Brand (nearly 100 free copies shipped) I’m ready to release another creative ops opus. I put a poll on LinkedIn to find out what The People really want to see and I’m reposting it here.

If any of these titles are interesting to you, I’d love for you to vote!

I’ll be back next week with a treatise on how embarrassing advertising has become, and how Apple has abandoned its core* users to become gen pop’s all-around lifestyle device provider.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my favorite category of White Lotus discourse (aside from all the theories I’ve trawled on Reddit): Portia’s clothes.