When Sammy Nussdorf started making TikToks, his gourmet grocer Meadow Lane wasn’t open yet. His product tests ranged from the everyday (the best chocolate chip cookie) to the more culinary-whimsical (how to assemble a perfect collard green wrap, attending to the correct ratios of carrots to protein). It’s easy to see why Nussdorf, who posts under the handle @brokebackcontessa, has developed such a following—he’s genial, funny, and self-effacing. The videos starring Nussdorf are a funny little slice of life documenting the intimacies of opening a shop in New York. Meadow Lane is still not open, indefinitely delayed by Sisyphean disasters: Construction, building inspections, the city slow to turn on the gas.

As Nussdorf’s 127,000 followers idle, the luxury grocery market has started to bear fruit: Rigor Hill opened in 2022, Happier Grocery (widely seen as New York’s alternative to the L.A. hotspot Erewhon) in 2023, and soon, in a slightly diminished capacity, Erewhon herself. This past month Emily Sundberg broke the news that the patron saint of luxury grocers will be making the cross-continental flight to New York—opening up a space about the size of a sauna in the new members-only Kith Ivy. Those feeling frugal and unwilling to spend the $36,000 initiation fee can have their Hailey Bieber smoothies delivered. How many will be willing to buy melted smoothie slop for $20 plus delivery fees remains to be seen. Nussdorf, who Zoomed with me from his store, told me, “There’s a lot of private equity behind Erewhon. Currently, private equity doesn’t get involved unless they’re thinking something much larger, and that’s what I would put money on—that maybe this smoothie in Kith is a demo.” Overall, Nussdorf isn’t daunted by the wellness behemoth and thinks New York’s gourmet grocery scene is an area for growth: “I think as long as you create your own brand identity and are able to differentiate the experience of this store versus the other store.”

Beyond differentiating from each other, how does this new wave of grocers—stores where there’s often more blank space on the shelves than product—separate themselves from the luxury stores of yore: the Dean and Delucas, Citarellas, Tashkents, Zabars of the world?

Andrea Hernández, creator of the popular Substack *Snaxshot—*aptly dubbed by The New York Times the Nostradamus of snacking—has another name for stores like Erewhon: Hypebeast grocers. “It doesn’t seem like there’s enough in the store to make sense.” Hernández tells me, “There’s a difference between selling gourmet items versus selling the hype around the grocery store itself. Erewhon is the Supreme of grocery stores. The $30 smoothie I must try… They create an aura of scarcity.” The phenomenon is international. In Seoul, Monday Morning Market drops groceries like capsule collections.

In stark relief, Hernández describes our parents’ buying habits. They went to the store, and then got out. The big choice in the cereal aisle would be buying a private label (ShopRite’s own) over a name brand (Barilla) for the sake of affordability and value. Then, “Along comes our generation, growing up with social media and inheriting the behaviors of affordable affluence. It’s the lipstick effect.” You may not be able to afford a Birkin, but you can go and try a $20 strawberry at Erewhon and post about it in the same way. Whether you eat the berry at all, actually, doesn’t matter.

How many people can really afford to do a full shop at one of these stores? In 2023 New York Magazine ran a sobering profile about the Angelinos going into debt to afford their Erewhon habit—people fixated both on the potential wellness benefits and the potential upward mobility Erewhon has to offer. Hernández remarks, “It’s depressing to think that this is the way that we are able to kind of have that same dopamine hit of keeping up with the Joneses, but it’s like, what’s in your grocery cart?”

After the development of the first self-service grocery store Piggly Wiggly in 1916, packaging began to take on a more and more significant role in how we eat. There was an attempt to make products you might otherwise pass up in a grocery aisle more attractive. Now, with the advent of social media, branding, aesthetic intrigue, and hype are everything. “It’s the Trojan-horsing of aesthetics, the yass-ification of everything. Like, why does a can of beans have to look like that?” says Hernández. As she points out, Happier Grocery even offers transparent bags with the logo—like a walking display case for your carefully selected nut milks and pre-washed salad.

The issue, Hernández feels, is that we’ve “shaped grocery stores in our clout-chasing image.” She explains, “We’re the apex consumers, and we’re treating grocery stores like luxury stores. Everything around us has to signal something because of social media.” Nussdorf, however, is skeptical of how Erewhon and its direct competitors’ clout chasing will translate to a New York audience: “I don’t think these smoothies with these influencers or designers in New York City that some of these other competitors are doing is making them that much money.”

These “HypeMarts” have more shared DNA with Balenciaga or Telfar than they do with a Whole Foods, relying on scarcity, drops, and branding for business. Beyond acting like clothing brands, these grocery stores also have their own clothing brands. Hernández tells me, “Happier grocery sells $120 jackets. Erewhon has been dropping, like, merch capsules.” Happier Grocer was created by a former Marc Jacobs designer and is owned by the same team that runs the W.S.A. building in FiDi and S.A.A. in Bushwick—two fashion hot spots—and the luxurious Cayman Heights hotel Palm Heights. Flamingo Estate, a popular lifestyle brand that sells a $80 jar of dried strawberries, has the tagline “Mother Nature is the last great luxury house.”

The economics of these HypeMarts are often murky. In the Hamptons—where there’s a much-reported-on gourmet grocery arms race—Round Swamp is owned by the wife of a BlackRock billionaire and is basically closed for half the year. Grocery is a hard industry, and regular grocery stores operate on the thinnest of margins, facing expensive overheads and intense competition, sensitive to inflation and disruptions in the food chain. Because of that most grocery stores rely on high sales volume and inventory turnover. Hernández tells me, “That’s why you have chains like Walmart and Target, like Kroger and Albertsons. For Erewhon, they’ve been able to upend the traditional grocer dilemma, the thin margins, but only because they’ve commodified wellness and are selling it to you at a premium.” According to Hernández, as of last year Erewhon, which only has 10 physical stores, allegedly closed on $500 million in revenue. “If they took venture money—I know Stripes was backing them in 2019—they’ll eventually have to show something for it, chain-wise.”

The wellness these stores claim to offer, of course, can be as artificial as the sense of scarcity they’re cultivating. Instead of “Mother Nature as the last great luxury,” to paraphrase Flamingo Estate’s motto, these stores may offer processed foods with Mad Libs branding. Of Erewhon’s popular smoothies, Hernández says, “They’re filled with a bunch of sugar; you might as well have a couple Krispy Kreme donuts.” Aliza Abarbanel, the co-founder of food magazine Cake Zine and a contributing editor at TASTE, tells me, “I think if gourmet grocers are supporting small food producers, that’s a good thing, but for me, they’re fundamentally less interesting than the ethnic grocers like Tashkent, Hong Kong Grocery, Zabar’s, Titan, et cetera. I would much rather discover something new to me than shop IRL what I’m seeing all over Instagram. But then again, I don’t have a fear of seed oils or a craving for beef tallow.” Viral grocery-store tourism hasn’t just bolstered the Rigor Hills of the world. This past summer New York Magazine declared that thebest spots to eat in the city were grocery stores.

These HypeMarts can feel particularly sinister when set against our current climate. New York Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has built a platform on city-owned grocery stores with the goal of keeping prices low for underserved communities. By November 1st, per our current government shutdown, nearly 42 million Americans who rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (previously referred to as food stamps) will be vulnerable.

Culturally, as our grocery stores have trended sparer, so too have our bodies. For the past two years, publications across the world have published, repetitively and without satisfaction, about whether being ultra thin was “back.” According to CNN, as of 2024 1-in-8 American adults has taken Ozempic or another GLP-1. For Hernández these grocery stores represent the final evolution of consumerism: When you see groceries not as a necessity but as luxury good. “It’s fucking dystopian as hell at a time where you have food inaccessibility, and people are having to DoorDash or eat Taco Bell because it’s cheaper than going to the grocery store. In Austin, there’s a store that’s opening soon with underground delivery because it’s cheaper and doesn’t have any overhead costs.” The brand (can we even call it a store?) is called Goods and advertises two-minute grocery delivery via “underground delivery” sent to a pickup lane near you. Hernández speculates, “Maybe we are going to start getting more groceries from underground tunnels, and then only if you can afford it, you’re gonna go have that luxury experience of going to an actual grocery store.” If that all sounds like a pipe dream, then it’s worth noting that when Erewhon debuts a new product, they often set up a selfie station with vegetables as the photo backdrop. Hernández, who grew up shopping at local markets in Honduras, turns somber: “We cannot unlearn convenience. We’re basically cosplaying being able to connect with what nurtures us.”

As for Meadow Lane—in a recent TikTok Nussdorf looks into the camera with his trademark wry humor. The store, he announced, was finally opening in November! So that made Meadow Lane…a Scorpio? Beyond making it out of construction purgatory, beyond having his own store, Nussdorf had a more personal message to his fans, “The thing I’m most excited for is to meet my first customer. I can’t wait to see who’s first in line. And if they’re open to it, I’d love a hug.”