Reading some article online about Sweetgreen made me wonder what we’re heading toward. Sweetgreen, Shake Shack, Chipotle — they’re already from a different era. Fast casual born from circumstances that looked different than the 1980s. We’re decades into this model, and whatever’s coming next makes them look almost quaint.

What if the next wave doesn’t even need storefronts? Ghost kitchens with necrobranded menus of dead chains. Drone delivery. App interfaces. Everything optimized away, friction gutted, people minimized.

This isn’t just automation. When platforms operate in a medium where there’s no investment in the social layer of communities, their purpose is just extraction with a veneer of customer satisfaction. For all their flaws, the franchise models of the past were at least locally based. They donated to Little Leagues, their owners often started in town before branching out.

Today? Distance rules everything.

What replaces that? We killed off local pharmacies for chains that once offered an easy way to get stuff. Now? Everything’s locked behind glass, stores don’t stock much, they’re staffed by 1-2 people, and the pharmacy might not be open at all. The Dollar Tree-ization of consumer retail leaves everyone poorer — not just in choice, but in envisioning what’s next.

Are we heading toward social lounges where you rent presence but don’t buy meals? Hybrid spaces that monetize sitting and waiting? Financialized touchpoints where belonging is subscription-based? If airport lounges and bank-owned coffee shops are harbingers, the next SoHo House might just be your local fast-food chain that partners with a bar. The entire mall becomes access-only, demanding brand loyalty through an access card. This devastates communities.

The real risk? Not just job loss. Social atomization.

Efficiency becomes a filter, not a facilitator. Casual connection, economic mixing, human improvisation — all deterred by design. The idea that you could meet neighbors at a sporting event diminishes when we turn public schools into charters, and everybody ditches their school team because parents are spending big on travel sports that professionalized even the fringe kid’s dream of playing “at the next level.”

Local storefronts face their own issues, because real estate doesn’t reward usefulness anymore. Opaque metrics and the velocity of technology make it hard for cities to adapt to the game. The mechanics are controlled by outsider actors who aren’t invested in the communities they operate in. Empty storefronts sit for years because vacancy helps the balance sheet.

So what kind of chains survive? Fast casual worked because it solved for volume and vibe both. But with ghost kitchens and speculative retail, the ideal tenant might be a logistics node, not a café.

The future chain doesn’t need to be desirable — just rentable by design.

Who builds the next Sweetgreen? Wrong question. Who owns the interface layer when storefronts dissolve? Real estate firms? App platforms? AI white-labelers? Financial products disguised as gathering spaces?

The chains of 2030 might not sell meals at all. They’ll sell temporary access to logistics streams. And we’ll call it innovation.