[1440] in Humor
HUMOR: Chains
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Thu May 16 00:16:22 1996
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 00:08:31 EDT
Look at the bright side. At least Denver is still different enough that
Herman *noticed* that he wasn't in New England any more. How long do
you think that will last?
-Drew
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996 22:13:15 +0000 (GMT)
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Subject: Hermann Hates with a Vengeance (issue #4)
From: HermHates@aol.com
HERMANN HATES Chains
-- Copyright 1996 by Andrew Hermann
Last year I had the grim experience of living in Denver, a city with clean
sidewalks and great bars and beautiful weather and no traffic and lots of
skiing and hiking and mountain biking nearby and so many people who are
just so damned happy to live there that you feel like a Nine Inch Nails
song come to life if you aren't grinning like an idiot every waking moment
of the day. If you haven't been, go visit sometime, but make sure you're
in good mood before you do or you'll be really miserable by the time you
get back.
One of the first places I had the opportunity to visit in Denver was a
brewpub called the Rock Bottom Brewery. My boss took me there for lunch
on my first day. (I had moved to Denver for a job, you see, which may
explain why on some deep level I resented everyone acting so happy all
the time--me, I didn't know a soul, I lived in a dump, it was my first
year out of school and I was overwhelmed--so why, I kept thinking, is
everyone smiling? Don't they feel my pain?) The Rock Bottom was a great
place--the menu was urban chic but cheap for downtown, the beer was tasty
and cleverly named after various local landmarks--Rocky Mountain Red,
Pike's Peak Pale, that sort of thing--the waitstaff was friendly (I was
still new in town, remember, fresh from life among the sourpusses of New
England, and friendly waitstaff was a novelty and not yet a special form
of torture), they played cool music, they had pool tables--and not those
cheesy little coin-op bar tables, but real, regulation-sized pool tables
with clean felt and leather-lined pockets--oh, it was heaven, I tell you!
It was also, I discovered, a chain. When I described it to a friend in
Minneapolis, mentioning it as one of the few highlights in Denver, she
replied, "Oh, yeah. We have one of those."
I went on to learn, over the course of my year among the Shiny Happy
People, that just about every dining, drinking, and retail attraction in
Denver was a chain: the Old Chicago Bar & Grill, Alfafa's health-food
supermarket, the Spaghetti Factory, the Outback, Mediaplay. Even Denver's
arthouse cinemas, every last one of them, were owned by some conglomerate
called Landmark.
Now I don't have a problem with chains per se--in fact, the retail chains
of Denver tended to be, like the city, clean, hip, and friendly.
Mediaplay had lots of comfy couches and chairs in the books department
and a huge jazz section in the music department. Alfafa's had an in-store
cafe and a great deli with lots of home-baked muffins and biscuits. The
Mayan, Landmark's flagship movie theatre, was built inside a restored
turn-of-the-century movie palace and had all kinds of funky art nouveau
decor and an espresso bar in the lobby. No, Denver definitely has some
cool chains, but this is precisely the problem I have with them--they're
TOO cool.
Chains, you see, aren't supposed to be cool. They're not supposed to fool
you into thinking you've made a "discovery" when in fact you've just been
taken in by market research and consumer demographics studies. Chains
are supposed to be cheesy and pre-fab. They're supposed to have
employees in paper hats, big goofy roadside signs with corporate logos or
cartoon mascots, interiors covered in linoleum and fake wood paneling,
sullen, acne-riddled customer service, and mediocre product. I think at
one time they were all required by law to have orange figure prominently
in their color scheme.
There's something dishonest about a cool chain store. Time was you went
to a chain because it was convenient, or cheap, or because you were on a
family vacation and the kids wanted a McDonald's burger, mommy, and not
some other mystery meat unfamiliar to their delicate little digestive
tracts. If you wanted atmosphere, character, quality, tradition,
personality, and all those other intangibles, you went to a neighborhood
bar, a neighborhood restaurant, a neighborhood store, a one-of-a-kind
place where the guy behind the counter owned the joint, the staff were
all related, and the stuff on the top shelves or in the back of the menu
apparently existed nowhere else on earth.
You can still find places like that, but their numbers are dwindling.
Because sometime in the last ten years or so chains finally began to
figure out how to seem like they weren't chains. They started becoming
"cool." And once that happened, they began eating up the little local
joints like sharks devouring guppies. It's like some evil, free
enterprise version of Darwinian theory. First there was McDonald's, then
there was Denny's and Sizzler, then there was Bennigan's and Ruth's Chris
Steakhouse. Now places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the Outback are taking
over the world, places that not only improve upon the Bennigan's make-it-
feel-like-a-local-joint-by-hanging-antiques-and-old-pictures-on-the-walls
formula (and that's really all the Hard Rock's doing, folks, they're just
doing it with Jimi Hendrix's guitars instead of your Grandad's farm
tools), but have the temerity to actually serve good food. Encore gave
way to Barnes & Noble, Sam Goody gave way to Tower, Dunkin' Donuts gave
way to Starbuck's, Two Guys gave way to Nieman Marcus. The new chains
have style, the new chains are sexy, the new chains make Mr. Johnson's
store on the corner look like a relic from a bygone era. Which,
unfortunately, is exactly what Mr. Johnson's store is. And unless Mr.
Johnson has some pull with the Historic Register, chances are his store's
going to turn into a Thrifty-Mart before the next election.
Now that they've finally learned to be cool, chains are everywhere,
especially in big-city downtown neighborhoods where the old
independently-owned places can no longer afford the rent. Downtown chains
don't have any natural predators and are free to multiply exponentially,
like any other urban pest. My favorite example of this is a New England
chain of cafe/sandwich shops called Au Bon Pain. When I worked downtown
I counted seven Au Bon Pains within a five minute walk of my building.
You can literally stand on the doorstep of any Au Bon Pain in Boston and
throw a rock through the window of the next one. In fact, you probably
should.
Of course, chains are not unaware of the resentment they breed in some of
us older fuddy-duddies who can remember the days when commercial districts
were actually distinguishable from one another. They make efforts to
counteract this negative vibe in various ways. Some try to camouflage
their franchises in a vain attempt to blend in with their surroundings.
McDonald's, for example, has developed the charming habit of taking over
historic downtown buildings and preserving the exterior architecture while
gutting the interior to make room for the Fry Machine and More Seating
Upstairs. Others adopt certain aspects of the local culture. McDonald's,
again, is the master of this. Their franchise on Wall Street has a
uniformed doorman; I imagine their franchise in Montgomery, Alabama has
a "coloreds only" drinking fountain. Still others try convince the wary
consumer that the chain is in some way contributing to the local culture.
Border's Books features a "Local Interest" section, which always makes me
wonder if they don't ever get confused and ship all the books on the
Appalachian trail and Yankee quilt making to Baton Rouge by mistake.
My favorite example of a big chain trying to make itself at home among
the locals comes from Macy's, which recently incurred the wrath of
Bostonians by taking over the beloved Beantown department store Jordan
Marsh. Somebody must've told the P.R. and marketing guys that we New
Englanders love our traditions, because when the Macy's signs went up a
few months ago, so did banners proudly proclaiming, "A New Tradition in
New England." Now maybe I'm just being pedantic here, but I always
thought that traditions were, by definition, old. Like, say, Jordan
Marsh, which I think had been around since before the Boston Tea Party.
Macy's in Boston is about as traditional as pork chops at Passover.
I used to think there would be some kind of market saturation point for
all this chain-mania, that sooner or later the chains would begin
competing with themselves and that this would stop their growth. The new
CVS would take customers away from the old CVS and finally some corporate
muckety-muck would wake up and say, "No more!" But this was before I
wised up to human nature and realized that those corporate muckety-mucks
were the same guys who as kids would insist on playing out the Monopoly
game until every last piece of property on the board was theirs.
At one point, for example, Au Bon Pain actually sold Starbuck's coffee,
and this was just when Starbuck's had bought out a local chain called the
Coffee Connection and was opening stores of its own all over the region.
Can you say "anti-trust," boys and girls? Well, none of the government
watchdogs could for quite a while, but someone finally managed to blurt
it out and Au Bon Pain switched to Folger's Crystals or something tasting
remarkably like it.
But see, here's where my observation about the new chains being cool and
all makes its return appearance. Because Starbuck's, it just so happens,
makes a mean cup of coffee. So next time that government watchdog,
instead of barking anti-trust, might just say, "But I like Starbuck's
coffee." And then where would we be? Drinking Starbuck's coffee and
getting all our reading material from Barnes & Noble, all our groceries
from Stop & Shop, and all our haircuts from Great Clips, that's where.
I'm not saying we're on our way to the uniformity of, say, communist China
or fascist Italy. Because for one thing, the stores are cooler. But it
does feel to me like our rampant, free market, only-the-strong-survive
economy is leading us to a time when "freedom of choice" will refer only
to ten different kinds of Extra Value Meals. And the people serving them
up to you will be ex-entrepreneurs who were driven out of the market
because they were naive enough to think that owning one store was enough.
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