Apparently, the New York Times Magazine has been snooping around Catgut. Rob Walker writes,
[I]n offering a comfortable, friendly setting, Life Time [an enormous gym that offers many amenities only peripherally related to fitness] relies on a strategy that is getting quite a workout these days: bookstores, coffee shops, even Home Depot (with its various do-it-yourself workshops) are all trying to offer consumers a setting that's meant to give people a ''third place,'' aside from work and home, where they want to go. (Churches have used this term as well -- there's even a Third Place Cafe at the Crossroads Church in Southern California.) Suburban sprawl may be alienating and disconnecting, but there are any number of retail environments where you can buy a little community, or at least some sense of it; maybe Life Time is not so much a gym with amenities as an oversize Starbucks with weights.
Any desire can be turned into corporate profits, even the desire to engage in delightfully spontaneous human interaction in an ostensibly non-corporate setting. We have to be vigilant. And keep our fingernails short.
good eye, bix! And even better social commentary. You have your finger on the pulse...good thing it's a trimmed finger.
Posted by: airplane | May 13, 2006 at 05:28 PM