plain taco The humble taco: A critical turning point in the economy, or...just a taco? iStockphoto.com
 

by Todd Kliman

How bad's the economy?

Dot-com darling Yahoo! yesterday laid off 1,500 employees (bringing to nearly 100,000 the number of laid-off tech workers this year).

Almost lost amid the exiting of the techies and the soundings of doom in Silicon Valley was this odd little tidbit: A small outfit called Tokbox parked a taco truck outside the Yahoo! compound, handing out tortas, burritos, two-ply tacos — and job applications. The video-chat start-up was looking to fill — count 'em — five positions.

But what does it mean? After the jump...

A young, hungry start-up doling out Tex-Mex like it's a county fair and punking the once-young-and-hungry titan on its own turf (the effrontery! the symmetry!) is not just a stunt. It's naked opportunism masquerading as a stunt.

In other words, business as usual in Silicon Valley, where goofiness has always masked aggression.

The rise of the dot-coms gave rise to casual Friday, and to the notion of the workplace as a campus, a stress-free idyll where employees play as hard as they work and where "outside-the-box" is an over-repeated mantra (true creatives ask: what box?).

Gullibles in the media (particularly in the new media) proclaimed it to be a model for a new age, a new America, and have tried to sell us on the idea that the new breed of business is not concerned with the old-breed values — as if the nerdy follow-your-bliss atmosphere of these companies could not possibly produce a rapacious capitalism. And the names! Hard to think that a company named Yahoo! or Google could be up to anything too greedy or dirty. (Exclamation points are joyous!)

A taco truck, though. That simultaneously raises and lowers the bar for future takeovers/poachings. Good one, Tokbox.

Todd Kliman is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic and the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine. The Wild Vine, his book about the Rosetta stone of American wine, is due in 2009.

categories: Food

1:23 - December 11, 2008

What is this?

Share