In early February Arturo Payamps, the general manager of a City Fresh Market grocery store in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, received a message on WhatsApp from a friend. It included a link to a TikTok video showing the outside of the store with a sign for Erewhon, the trendy organic grocer in Los Angeles, in the place where a City Fresh sign was mounted after the grocery store, which opened as an Associated Supermarket in the early 2000s, adopted the name City Fresh Market in later years.
“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 seeing the video, which took viewers around the grocery store 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 purportedly $20 beet-and-spinach smoothie from the store’s juice counter, were fake. (Mr. Payamps said such a drink actually costs around $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 given in the video as “misinformation.” She attempted to have the TikTok post removed from the platform, she added, but was unsuccessful.
Since it was posted the video, which was also shared on Instagram, has received more than 1.1 million views on that platform and more than 600,000 views on TikTok. Certain comments on the Instagram post suggested that some who saw it might have been duped. “Gentrification gone wild,” read one. But other comments on the video recognized it for the prank that it was: “Anyone that thinks this is real hasn’t experienced Erewhon,” one read.
