The coolest supermarket that never existed

In early February, Arturo Payamps, the general manager of a City Fresh Market supermarket in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, received a message on WhatsApp from a friend. It included a link to a TikTok video showing the store’s exterior with a sign for Erewhon, the trendy Los Angeles organic grocer, where a City Fresh sign was mounted after the market opened in the early 2000s .

“Have you tried the Bushwick Erewhon yet?” read the caption of the TikTok post.

Mr. Payamps, 42, said in an interview on Tuesday that he was “in shock” after watching the video, which showed viewers around the supermarket while pointing out the cost of various items. Some of the prices given for products — $11.99 for a dozen organic eggs, $9.29 for a box of Cap’n Crunch — were real. But others, like a $20 beet-and-spinach smoothie from the store’s juice aisle, were fake. (Mr. Payamps said such a drink actually costs about $6.50.)

Dulce Simono, 36, a manager at City Fresh, called the video harmful and confusing. “I didn’t take it as a joke,” she said, describing the price of the juice in the video as “misinformation.” She tried to have the TikTok post removed from the platform, she added, but was unsuccessful.

Since posting, the video, which was also shared on Instagram, has been viewed more than 1.1 million times on that platform and more than 600,000 views on TikTok. Certain comments on the Instagram post suggested that some who saw it may have been duped. “Gentrification is out of control,” read one. But other comments on the video acknowledged the joke that it was: “Anyone who thinks this is real hasn’t experienced Erewhon,” it said.

The video was shared by social media accounts for Hotspot, a listings and recommendations app described in its marketing copy as “Yelp for hot people.” Stanley Vergilis, 32, founder of Hotspot, and Joey Cannizarro, 29, its social media manager, said in a joint interview that producing videos with the intention of sparking conversations on social media is a way to draw attention to the company .

Mr. Cannizarro, who lives in Bushwick, came up with the idea of ​​Bushwick Erewhon after a recent trip to Los Angeles, where he visited an actual Erewhon location. He said while wandering the aisles, he noticed that some items cost about the same as similar products sold at his local City Fresh. Mr. Cannizaro, who has lived in New York for 11 years, said the video was intended to highlight the stores’ nearly identical prices and what he called “the changing landscape” of Bushwick, which is beginning to see the kind of gentrification experience that has transformed the world. nearby Williamsburg neighborhood.

According to a report According to New York University’s Furman Center, which studies housing policy, white residents made up about 3 percent of Bushwick’s population in 2000, while black and Hispanic residents combined made up about 91 percent. Between 2017 and 2021, white residents made up about 24 percent of the neighborhood’s population, while black and Hispanic residents accounted for about 64 percent. Households with median incomes between $100,001 and $250,000 made up about 13 percent of Bushwick’s population in 2000; between 2017 and 2021 they were about 25 percent.

The Bushwick Erewhon video “leverages something that already exists, that is already in the air,” Mr. Cannizarro said. “It’s just credible enough that the people who picked it up are working on it. And those who didn’t understand it were fooled by it. He added that some who believed the video was real may have been duped because the City Fresh store has a “very specific interior design, just as Erewhon also has a specific design agenda.”

That Erewhon executives have said they plan to open a store in New York may also have made it more credible. Company representatives did not respond to requests for comment at the time of this article’s publication.

Mr. Vergilis believed the video became popular “because people already thought the store was too expensive and a sign of gentrification,” he said.

Bushwick’s changing demographics have also been observed by Mr. Payamps during his time at City Fresh. “We have a lot more younger customers now,” he says. “We used to have a lot more Spanish-speaking customers. Now we have people from all over the world.”

“My opinion is that the neighborhood is changing for the better,” he said, adding that inflation has played a role in the store’s prices.

Mr. Payamps said as Bushwick has evolved, so has City Fresh. “We used to have a lot of rice. Now we have a whole station with quinoa,” he said. Another change: Following the Bushwick Erewhon video, there are now plans to start a TikTok account for the City Fresh store.