The New Yorker recently published an article about the insane lengths New Yorkers will go to secure a restaurant reservation.
Of course it all comes down to status. After all, food is just food, wine is just wine. Even at the Michelin level, it only gets so good.
What matters is signaling that you can get the table when even affluent people can’t. It’s spawned entire industries: apps, websites, reseller markers, and not to mention good old-fashioned bribery.
In other words, a flex.
Seems nuts, right?
It’s ancient behavior. The Roman Emperor Calacalla forced remote, inland provinces to serve him the most expensive seafood available, not because he was hungry but because he could. The Byzantine capital of Constantinople got rich by selling Holy relics (Splinters of the “True Cross” and Saint toenail clippings) to gullible Westerners.
This is why a Picasso can fetch tens of millions of dollars. There’s only one of him, and there’s lots of art collectors with money. Even if you can afford it, you’re competing with others just like you – so it becomes about which buyer enhances the status of the seller the most. Same with Ferraris and Hermès bags. The money is just table stakes. The real game is in the invisibles.
And it’s not just rich people playing what Will Storr calls “Status Games.” We mere mortals play too.
Right now, people are going mad for ugly dolls called “Labubu’s”. They’re nothing special, just a fad akin to the Beanie Baby craze of the 1990s, with all the usual artificial scarcities and cult-like behavior baked in. Only this time, there’s online videos documenting the social contagion for our doomscrolling pleasure.
The father of modern anthropology, Branislaw Malinofski studied how Trobriand Island Tribes would paddle hundreds of dangerous miles to their neighboring islanders to trade sea shell necklaces. The necklaces had no material value, they just carried a lot of symbolic worth. The shells had no material value. What mattered was the Chief risking the lives of his best men to exchange them. Like how when you won a competition in the ancient Olympics, the material prize was an olive-branch crown, not gold. The glory was the prize.
What’s funny about these insane New York restaurant status games is if you drive twenty miles in any direction, they become irrelevant. Suddenly the same people are happy with mom n’ pop tacos or roadside steak houses.
Status games aren’t written in stone, they’re environmental. What works in Manhattan may not work in Arizona. Different priorities, same complexity.
The mark of a good leader isn’t just knowing how to win at these games. It’s being able to create the games themselves and get others to play along.
That’s what real power looks like. |
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