The Hidden Cost of a Free Lunch

Whatever Happened to South Park?

As the storm clouds gather on our little startup sanctuary once again, there is hand-wringing and pre-emptive depression about what it may mean about our pampered work lives. Good news: having been through this before, it may actually be a blessing.

Okay, so check this out. It’s B-roll video footage that my old friend Ryan Junell made back in 1999 capturing the lunch hour in San Francisco’s South Park, the neighborhood in which I’ve spent an embarrassing percentage of my professional life. About a year ago I found myself working here yet again. In the mid to late 90's the area became popular as ground zero for San Francisco’s tech startup scene — things were starting to seem bubbly, but weren’t in the danger zone just yet. We were all so horrifyingly/refreshingly naive back then.

At first glance it appears that not much has changed. The buildings are virtually all the same (most especially, the Gran Oriente Filipino Masonic Temple, a monument to old San Francisco), as are three of its four restaurants, which is phenomenal stability by SF standards. Same playground equipment, signage, park benches, landscaping. Shockingly unchanged.

However, on closer inspection there are some very noticeable differences. Can you spot them?

• SO MANY BAGGY KAKHIS. Oh, and pleats!
• No electric cars. Not even hybrids. In fact, this was the year that GM killed the electric vehicle
• No beards. Not even stubble. (Okay, I did spot one goatee, but I’d argue that proves the rule)
• Nobody is looking down at their cell phones, I mean nobody, and I can tell you that many of us DID have them in our pockets. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is strangely disorienting to me, like seeing people walking around without thumbs on their hands.

You can draw your own conclusions about such observations. But what I really want to point out is that South Park is PACKED. You’d be hard pressed to find an empty spot on the lawn, let alone a table or a bench. There is a line down the block to get a sandwich at Caffe Centro (famous for its bad caesar salads and worse coffee)! This was how it was every day back in the 90s, and later in the mid 2000's. It’s easy to forget how popular it was to eat outside in this quaint urban park with its Parisian pretensions coated in San Francisco grime. The park is currently undergoing renovations (and it may yet burst forth, Phoenix-like, when it reopens), but sixteen years later this is what lunch hour looked like:

Where is everybody, you ask? Hmmmm.

Now, to be fair, South Park has gone through ghost town stages before. It was so empty in post-bubble burst 2002 that a WIRED employee unleashed tumbleweeds in the park to make an irony-drenched point. But we’ve been in the midst of a bull run in the local tech scene, so this is something different.

One obvious explanation is that there are a lot more places to eat these days. There are food trucks, ballpark eateries and New American bistros with rotating menus and home-brewed kombucha. And while this is true, it isn’t as persuasive as it first appears. Most people don’t eat at the fancy ballpark restaurants that cater more to bridge-and-tunnel crowd, the new bistros occupy places that were restaurants before, and as for food trucks, well people still need to sit and eat, don’t they? And where better than a beautiful neighborhood park?

No, the answer is that for workplaces around here eating in has replaced eating out, thanks to the free food that more and more companies provide as a perk. At least this is my hypothesis based on personal experience. My company, until recently, was bringing in a daily meal from a delightful locavore joint, Picnic on Third — delicious, paleo dishes! — and it did get everyone on our team talking to one another beyond the brutal pragmatism that dominates work conversation. It was a good way to cultivate esprit de corp within our team.

But it meant most of us never left the office unless we made the effort. And making an effort was so. Much. Effort.

(Worse, even when we do leave the office to grab a burrito from Mexico au Parc or a crispy pork belly and fried egg sandwich from Bacon Bacon we usually come straight back to the office. And then we’re just as likely to eat at our desks, despite the evidence suggesting that this is a terrible idea for both productivity AND mental health.)

Companies like ours provide these free meals to our staffs for a few reasons: a.) because it’s become a norm (all the cool companies are doing it), and b.) it’s so damned convenient for people. And when it’s convenient for staff the company benefits through more uninterrupted work hours. Everybody wins.

Well…not everyone. Lots of working folks aren’t getting catered lunches brought in to their offices, and plenty of people in the community don’t work in offices at all. Still others don’t work at all–gasp! But now that SF has (arguably) become a single-industry town we no longer question that eating in is the new normal. And at least in South Park it has led to a noticeable hollowing out of the neighborhood community experience.

We stopped having our lunch brought in a few weeks ago and I’m now making a habit of roaming the ‘hood at lunchtime. I now realize what I’ve been missing.

I’ve bumped into a dozen people I haven’t seen in far too long, and had more than a few memorable conversations with random weirdos that have sent my creative mind spinning. I’ve picked up a bit of other people’s trash along the way (give a hoot, people!), and made note of some Lost Cat flyers. I’ve eaten at some old favorite restaurants, including today when I took my son, Quinn Muller, to Primo Patio, an outdoor Caribbean restaurant that I’ve been going to for twenty years!

This corner of San Francisco still feels adrift to me, flavored more by Giants fans and Uber gridlock than the dreamers and cyberpunks that put it on the map. But these days it also seems recoverable, if enough of us bother to claim it as our own.

In the final analysis, free lunch in the office may have helped me stay focused at work, but being free for lunch is helping me bring more me to my work.