I was hired in February to produce a three-minute hype reel for the EnshitifAi annual partner kickoff. My brief was straightforward. I was to sit down with the three practice leads behind our 2024 and 2025 retail and food-service wins — Walmart, Chipotle, and Starbucks — and capture thirty seconds of each of them saying something inspirational into a Sony FX6 I rented for the weekend.
What I have instead is eleven hours of footage that my editor will not cut. The three practice leads did not know each other. They had never been in a room together. They figured out, on camera, over the course of a single afternoon in our Culver City edit bay, that they had independently implemented the same playbook in three different industries. I watched them figure it out. I left the cameras running. I am not sure whether what I captured is the kickoff reel or the strategic liability. I am publishing it anyway.
Act I — The Pedestal
Bradley Thune, a tall man in a gray half-zip and wire-rimmed glasses, practice lead for Retail Physical-to-App Conversion. He is sitting in a gray armchair in our Culver City office, holding a small ceramic coffee cup. He has been briefed that this is on the record.
Thune: So the pedestal scanner was — and I want to be clear about this, because I think people misunderstand the economics — the pedestal scanner was a subsidy. We were paying for it. The customers were using it for free.
Interviewer (offscreen): "We" meaning Walmart.
Thune: We, meaning our client. Yes. Walmart. The pedestal cost somewhere around twelve hundred dollars to manufacture, depending on vintage, plus maintenance — you know, when the kids unplug them, when the barcode laser gets dusty — and most stores had between three and seven of them. That's ten to forty thousand dollars per store in capex and opex that returned zero marginal revenue. Customers used the pedestal, found a price, and either bought the item or didn't. Walmart was paying for a service the customer enjoyed. The service was free to the customer.
(Pause. Thune takes a sip of his coffee.)
Thune: That's not a business model. That's philanthropy.
Interviewer (offscreen): What did you recommend?
Thune: We recommended Walmart stop paying for other people's price checks.
(Thune looks at the interviewer and waits. The interviewer waits. Neither of them says anything for about four seconds. Thune breaks first.)
Thune: The mobile app already existed. The customer was already carrying the device. The customer's device could do the exact same thing the pedestal did. And the customer's device — unlike our pedestal — was connected to an account. So the question became: why are we paying to run a service that produces no data, when the customer has already brought a device that produces all of the data?
Interviewer (offscreen): Walmart's stated reason was maintenance costs.
Thune: The maintenance costs were real. We ran those numbers. But the reason we got on the phone with Walmart in 2022 was not that the machines were breaking. The reason was that the data was free money and nobody was picking it up.
(Beat.)
Thune: The stated reason is always the less interesting one.
Act II — The Quesadilla
Dennis Kowalski, early forties, wearing a black polo shirt with a Chipotle lapel pin he has declined to remove. He is sitting at a long bleached-oak table in a conference room with no windows. He is smiling.
Kowalski: Okay, so. Stop me if you've heard this. You walk into a Chipotle. You get in line. You stand there. You look up at the menu. You see quesadillas on the menu.
Interviewer (offscreen): Do you?
Kowalski: (Still smiling.) No. Actually. No. You do not. That's the first thing. The quesadilla is not on the in-store menu board. The quesadilla exists on the menu that lives inside the app. So the customer who hasn't installed the app doesn't know the quesadilla is an option, and the customer who has installed the app knows it's an option but also knows they can't order it from the person in front of them.
(Kowalski nods, as if confirming his own statement.)
Kowalski: The elegance is that the person who is blocked from ordering the quesadilla at the counter doesn't experience it as a block. They experience it as an absence. The item simply is not part of the world they inhabit. For them. In that moment.
Interviewer (offscreen): And the Lifestyle Bowls.
Kowalski: And the Keto Bowl, yes. And the High-Protein Bowl. And the Vegetarian Bowl. And the Plant-Powered Bowl. Those are an entire menu segment that is, for the counter customer, invisible.
Interviewer (offscreen): Some people have complained that this is —
Kowalski: I've heard the word "inaccessible." I've heard the word "exclusionary." I want to be clear — I'm a strategist, I'm not a philosopher — but I don't think an item you don't know exists is inaccessible to you. I think it's a non-item. For you.
(Kowalski laughs softly. No one else laughs.)
Kowalski: And the Digital Makeline, you know, the back-of-house line that makes the app orders — we love the Digital Makeline. Because the counter customer doesn't see it. The counter customer sees the counter line. The counter customer thinks the counter line is the whole kitchen. It isn't. But it's the whole kitchen that the counter customer is allowed to know about.
Interviewer (offscreen): That sounds —
Kowalski: It sounds like what?
(The interviewer does not complete the question.)
Act III — The Pickup Window
Clarisse Weatherby, practice lead for the Starbucks engagement. She is younger than the other two, wearing an expensive linen jacket and a thin silver necklace that she touches twice during the interview. The Starbucks engagement overlapped with the Chipotle engagement by about fourteen months and Weatherby has, according to her own self-description, "the emotional vocabulary of the brand."
Weatherby: The third place was always a marketing concept.
Interviewer (offscreen): Schultz —
Weatherby: Howard Schultz used the phrase, yes, he borrowed it from sociology — from Ray Oldenburg, I believe — and what he meant was that there's home, there's work, and then there's the in-between. The café. The place you go that isn't either. Schultz pitched Starbucks as the third place.
Interviewer (offscreen): You don't buy it.
Weatherby: I buy that he believed it. I don't buy that it was ever true.
(Weatherby touches the necklace.)
Weatherby: Starbucks was never a café. Starbucks was a real-estate company renting third-places to customers, then a loyalty-program company running a payments network, and for the last ten years — since Mobile Order & Pay launched in September 2015 — Starbucks has been, mechanically, a mobile-ordering engine that dispenses coffee on the back end. The customer interacts with the phone. The barista interacts with the customer's phone. The coffee is what happens between them.
Interviewer (offscreen): And the pickup-only stores.
Weatherby: Those are the physical admission. A pickup-only Starbucks has no seating. No tables. No couches. No power outlets for laptops. No bathrooms for non-customers. It is a room with a counter where an app order materializes into a paper cup. The third-place concept is not present in the pickup-only store. It is not underperforming in the pickup-only store. It is not represented in the pickup-only store. It has been architecturally removed.
Interviewer (offscreen): And Brian Niccol.
(Weatherby smiles.)
Weatherby: Brian Niccol runs Starbucks now.
Interviewer (offscreen): He was at Chipotle.
Weatherby: He was at Chipotle. He engineered the Digital Makeline. He engineered the Chipotlane. He engineered the digital-only menu items. He did all of that at Chipotle, and then Starbucks hired him in September 2024 for a one hundred million dollar pay package, because the board at Starbucks looked at Brian Niccol and looked at what he had done at Chipotle and said: we would like him to come do that here. To us. On our stores.
(Beat.)
Weatherby: That is not a coincidence. That is not an industry cluster. That is a specific executive moving between two specific engagements in a recognized category. And my understanding is that Brian is an EnshitifAi alum.
Interviewer (offscreen): Is he?
Weatherby: Not officially. Not on paper. But he ran the playbook. And the playbook came from here.
Interlude — The Customer
I drove to a Walmart in North Hollywood on the second Saturday in March. I was not in my capacity as a documentary producer. I was buying replacement filters for my air purifier. The pedestal scanner that I remembered from 2019 — and that my father, when he visited me, relied on because he does not own a smartphone — was not present in the store. I walked from the front of the store to the back. I looked for it. I asked an associate. She said there was one by the registers. There was not. She said there was one by electronics. There was not. She said she was sorry.
On the way out I stopped at the exit greeter, whose name tag said HAROLD. Harold was in his late sixties. I asked him where the price scanners were. He smiled, held up a phone that looked to be about five years old, pointed at it, and said: "It's in here now. You gotta download the app."
"Do you have the app, Harold?" I asked.
"I do," Harold said. "My niece downloaded it for me. I don't know how to do that stuff."
"Does it work okay for you?" I asked.
Harold thought about it.
"It asks for my location a lot," he said.
The Synthesis
The three practice leads agreed to come into our Culver City edit bay on the last Thursday in March, ostensibly to review B-roll selects for the kickoff reel. They had not previously met each other. Bradley Thune and Dennis Kowalski were introduced over the phone by our staffing coordinator. Clarisse Weatherby joined via Zoom and then came down from the Bay Area for the in-person session.
What follows is a transcription of roughly eleven minutes of unscripted discussion that occurred after my edit review concluded and while the three of them were waiting for their respective Ubers. I left the cameras on. None of them objected.
Kowalski: — so wait, what was Walmart before the conversion?
Thune: The pedestal scanners.
Kowalski: Yeah, that's just — I mean, that's the same move.
Thune: What's the same move?
Kowalski: We blocked the quesadilla at the counter. You blocked the price check at the counter. It's — we both removed the offline path.
(Weatherby, who has been looking at her phone, looks up.)
Weatherby: I blocked the seating.
Thune: Wait, say that again.
Weatherby: At the pickup-only stores. I blocked the seating. That's the same move you two are describing. I blocked the offline path at Starbucks.
(Silence. About seven seconds of it. Thune looks at Kowalski. Kowalski looks at Weatherby. Weatherby looks at the camera.)
Weatherby: We all did the same thing.
Thune: We did not all do the same thing. We did — I mean, ours is capex reduction. It's — it was a maintenance cost —
Weatherby: Bradley.
Thune: — but yes. Okay. Yes. We all did the same thing. The framing was different in each engagement but the move is the same. You take the path that doesn't produce data and you remove it. You keep the path that produces data. You tell the customer the removed path was expensive to maintain. You direct the remaining customers to the path that remains.
Kowalski: Huh.
Weatherby: We should write this up.
Thune: We should not write this up.
What the Senior Director Said
I took the footage of this exchange to our Senior Director of Internal Communications, whose name I have been asked not to include. She watched it without expression. At the end she said — and I am quoting her exactly — "Margaret, this is the most on-voice piece of internal communications we have ever shot, and it is the single thing we can never ever publish."
I asked her why we couldn't publish it.
She said: "Because our clients haven't figured out what they paid us for, and this would tell them."
I asked her what they paid us for.
She said: "They paid us to find the place where a human being could still access the service anonymously, and to close it. Every partner on the board paid us for that. Sometimes the anonymous-access path was a price-check pedestal. Sometimes it was a counter order for a quesadilla. Sometimes it was a chair in a café. The shape of the path is different in each engagement. The work is the same."
Closing Voiceover
I am publishing this anyway because I took the job to make a hype reel, and the hype reel I would have made is not honest, and what Clarisse said on tape about her understanding that Brian is an EnshitifAi alum is the kind of detail my editor has been asking me to find for eight years, and I do not think I can sit on it any longer.
The synthesis meeting that happened in our edit bay on the last Thursday in March revealed what three separate senior engagement leads could not have written down as a deliverable because none of them had yet realized they were running it. They were all running the offline access removal. They were all running it at the same time. They were all running it on customers who had not been told it was being run on them.
My father still does not have a smartphone. I have not told him about any of this.
This post is satire. The pedestal scanners are gone. The quesadilla cannot be ordered at the counter. The pickup-only stores have no chairs. The offline access path has been removed, and no one has been asked to put it back.