Siren Yogurt

We’ve all been to yogurtland. The neon-and-antiseptic walls, the nave-like proportions; the blessed infinity of choices. The soulless negative of a charming, family-owned ice cream shop, but less likely to stop your heart. Self-serve frozen yogurt is the undisputed “in” dessert of the global bourgeoisie—but nary a good enough yogurt joint for the job in Harvard Square, the fermented dairy delight’s ideal market.

Until now: enter Yogurtland—capital Y—perched tastily between Maharaja and Bon Chon, its all-glass storefront beguiling the crowds of Winthrop Park. Its product—some dozen flavors of take-however-much-you-want, top-how-you-like, weigh-by-the-ounce yogurt—knocks the daylights out of vaunted neighborhood incumbents Berry Line and Pinkberry, which dispense yogurt behind the counter in fixed, unfree increments. No better place to throw my lactose intolerance to the wind, I remark to my roommates almost every other night as we round the corner to the coolest new place this side of Beat Hotel.

It is also perhaps the strangest. The presentation of a student ID (or sometimes, just a good-faith disclosure of student status) gets you three free ounces off the bat. With some audacity, you can manage six by getting seconds. The policy seems to be indefinite. Strawberries steep and bob in a water cooler up in a front alcove, flanked on each side by four stylized eyes. Your refreshing strawberry water—and all the rest!—brought to you by CBS.

Within a week of my first visit to Yogurtland, what was initially an innocent story of “too good to be true” took an otherworldly turn: The store was transfigured into a dairy-dispensing outlet of media giant CBS. My favorite flavors were either replaced or renamed by ill-conceived puns on the network’s lowbrow lineup—“Two and a Half Pistachios”, “How I Met Your Mocha”, and so on. Promotional posters ran the length and breadth of the storefront windows; as I rang up another free quarter-pound of yogurt, a ghastly scene from “Two and a Half Men” (now utterly worthless without Charlie Sheen) played over the register. “Don’t forget to come back on the 23rd!” the cashier called out. “Up to eight ounces free!”

On the 23rd, I showed up, was handed a cup, and received the debrief: “Make sure to watch new and old shows on the CBS line-up! Two Broke Girls! Two and a Half Men! Big Bang Theory! The Crazy Ones, with Robin Williams!”

“Robin Williams is a funny guy,” I admitted.

“Now go take as much as you want!”

After between 8 and 12 visits and plenty of amateur market-talk with friends, I think I’ve figured out the principles of Yogurtland’s business model.

1) Flood the market with a product so irresistibly superior and cheap that it washes the competition clear away.

2) Subsidize all-day, everyday free yogurt with ad money.

In other words: become the Facebook of yogurt. We’ve become accustomed to free, ad-powered and instantly gratifying services in the online realm—a great leveling of the information playing field, we’re told. But how about when the ad-powered service is a tangible thing as basic as food? Though not all would go as far as my roommate, who quips about Soylent Green, everyone who’s thought about it feels at least a bit off. Why?

In “Who Owns the Future?”, the newest jarring broadside against tech-triumphalism, industry guru Jaron Lanier attacks the idea of an online free lunch as anything but. Instagram, Google, and Amazon might very well make life easier and more expedient, but they concentrate data and creative revenue in the hands of few—leaving the middle-class well-plugged-in, but bereft of real opportunity. These “siren servers,” as he memorably terms them, present a Faustian bargain: Our free services for your valuable, money-making data.

The most orthodox form of the “siren server” scenario, reliant on seamless, massive transactions of data, is unlikely to hit offline markets any time soon. But the disaggregation of revenue from customer base—a looming possibility at Yogurtland—poses a radical question for businesses: To whom are we beholden—our product’s consumers or its backers?

It is admittedly hard to imagine any serious ill consequences of free, ad-backed “siren yogurt”—other than excessive exposure to “Two and a Half Men” and the replacement of taro-flavored purple stuff with a variety named after Liz Lemon. But look no further than my summer industry, the Israeli news media, for the real-life ramifications of new, non-customer-driven models of revenue.

From his air-conditioned Las Vegas perch, siren billionaire hack Sheldon Adelson threatens to do to The Jerusalem Post and Ha’aretz what Yogurtland seems poised to do to Berryline and Pinkberry: price them into oblivion with the help of a massive store of agenda-ridden capital.

Joshua B. Lipson ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow him on Twitter @Josh_Lipson