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Subway Sold to
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
This is a very useful perspective. I think back to the controversy in Oakland in 2006 when a Wal-Mart opened by the airport on land owned by the Port of Oakland. This horrified the progressive political machine in Oakland because of its opinion of Wal-Mart as an evil, feudal warlord oppressing the peasants that worked for it. But the Port of Oakland is able to operate with some independence from the Hugo Chávez fan club that clusters around City Hall, so Wal-Mart stayed...until they left in 2016 because the store was underperforming. Not a huge issue; there's one nearby in San Leandro.
But it led me to think about my mother's hometown in Missouri. People there have wanted a Wal-Mart for decades. That town is something of a regional center, particularly for government functions, has a substantial hospital, and a growing state college. They've even got fiber-optic Internet service. But they're not on a major highway, so Wal-Mart has bypassed them. Wal-Mart has gotten the blame for hollowing out many small-town downtowns, but this one already had a downtown that had gone steadily downhill. But no matter what, Bentonville HQ just isn't interested.
I used to wonder how McDonald's survived in a city with as many great food choices as San Francisco (there are more than a dozen in the city limits).
But last year, I really had my mind blown. We went to France---a place renowned for food. And while there, in Paris and the South of France, we saw:
McDonalds (there are 85 locations in Paris alone)
Subway (37 Paris locations)
Burger King (22 Paris locations)
KFC (12 Paris locations)
Five Guys (5 Paris locations)
As well as:
Dominos
Little Caesars
Chipotle
Starbucks
Popeye's
....and Krispy Kreme opens next month.
Yeah. A couple of stories:
We spent the summer of 2005 in Prescott, Arizona. The TV station I was working for in Phoenix had a studio there (it began as a Prescott station), my Mom had just died and taking the (then) wife and kids to the mountains for the summer sounded like and was a really good thing.
There were a lot of great mom and pop restaurants in Prescott---including at least three positively marvelous authentic Italian places. But the locals were losing their minds with joy because the city council had approved an Olive Garden.
The other story:
I grew up from age 9 to age 18 in Bishop, California. Population 3,000---270 miles from Los Angeles, 200 miles from Reno, not much in between until the past 20 or so years when Palmdale/Lancaster and Carson City got big enough to have significant shopping opportunities. Still, that's 200 miles to Lancaster, 170 to Carson City.
Shipping costs to get goods to Bishop factored into prices there, as did the small population base, which limited volume deals for merchants. And people were getting good and tired of the time and expense of driving south to Lancaster or L.A. or north to Carson City or Reno.
The push started in earnest in the 1980s---and they landed a K-Mart. You'd think someone had invented water.
Except that in about five years, any mom and pop that carried anything K-Mart carried was out of business or at death's door.
But K-Mart was doing fine. So fine, in fact, that they told the city council they'd outgrown their building and needed to build a new one---which they did, several blocks away, leaving an empty regulation-sized K-Mart in a town of 3,000 people with not a lot of businesses left, much less ones that needed that kind of square footage.
Well, you know how that ended---K-Mart became a dumpster fire, online shopping became a thing, and now, apart from a couple of restaurants, there are three businesses still alive that existed before, an independent bookstore that opened in 1970, a sporting goods store that's been there since 1956 and a western wear store that opened in 1922.
Now, all that would have probably happened once Amazon came along anyway, but the fact is that Bishop gave itself a 15-year head start on a lack of a local business tax base, empty storefronts-----but they got what they wanted---a K-Mart.
Taco Bell and KFC are some of the finest convenience dining establishments in the country. In fact, all of you are hungry, and should visit at least one today.
Bill Ballance on KFWB, Los Angeles in 1960, after reading copy for Wonder Bread:
"That's Wonder Bread. Eat several loaves tonight."
The first time I visted St. Petersburg, Russia in the later part of the 1990s it was still relatively as it'd been for years. The next time I returned in about 2005, it had been "Westernized" and many of the same restaurants you list above were readily available. Of course, while the logos were very familiar and looked the same as on those restaurants back here in the USA, the actual names were in Russian, so the signage looked a little different.
--There's a KFC/Taco Bell in Fort Lee near the George Washington Bridge. I once saw Tracy Morgan there ordering a bucket of KFC. In Connecticut, there are a couple of KFC/Long John Silver locations.
--Subway had once been the easiest fast food franchise to own and run. Virtually no cooking. During off hours, one person could handle everything. But the higher quality of Jersey Mike's, Jimmy John's, Firehouse Subs, etc. made Subway disappointing. The company has tried to boost its image. Note all the pro athletes doing Subway commercials. And the company now boasts it slices its cold cuts fresh. That was a move they didn't want to do but had to.
--Is it sad most Dunkin Donuts no longer make their own donuts? I can remember when you could peak in the kitchen and a vat of oil would be boiling donuts. But these days, only about 10% of Dunkin's income is from donuts. It's almost all about drinks and breakfast sandwiches. That's why it's now simply called "Dunkin."
--Subway had once been the easiest fast food franchise to own and run. Virtually no cooking. During off hours, one person could handle everything. But the higher quality of Jersey Mike's, Jimmy John's, Firehouse Subs, etc. made Subway disappointing. The company has tried to boost its image. Note all the pro athletes doing Subway commercials. And the company now boasts it slices its cold cuts fresh. That was a move they didn't want to do but had to.
--Is it sad most Dunkin Donuts no longer make their own donuts? I can remember when you could peak in the kitchen and a vat of oil would be boiling donuts. But these days, only about 10% of Dunkin's income is from donuts. It's almost all about drinks and breakfast sandwiches. That's why it's now simply called "Dunkin."
Dunkin' is deeply underwhelming.
In a radio or TV newsroom, a box of donuts---from Krispy Kreme or Winchell's or a mom and pop----will be gone in about ten minutes.
A box of Dunkin' will still have four left over at the end of the day.
Of course the Cyrillic spelling of “McDonalds” is pronounced the same way it is in English...an advantage of a phonetic alphabet.
Okay. That's good to know, because I'd pronounce that "Mak-poorlydrawncar-oha-thesymbolforpi-poorlydrawncaragain-kuh."
When I was in high school, there was a "college night" at a nearby school where the state universities were recruiting students from all the small towns in the area.
The rep from the place I wound up attending tried to sell it as something familiar. A small town we could relate to. She said "we're not one of those big universities. In fact, we like to describe it as only a two-McDonald's town."
We were like "wait...you've got TWO?!"
Forget a McDonald's. The biggest feature of our downtown was a stop light.
I can totally relate. We had exactly one stoplight, too. And my first move from there was a college town---San Luis Obispo, that seemed HUGE by comparison.
Bishop had NO chain restaurant until Foster Freeze rolled into town around 1960. After that, nothing until KFC showed up in 1968, and then Jack in the Box in 1976. McDonalds finally opened in 1980.
But---and this is SO typical---town of 3,000 people---they have TWO Starbucks.
Oh, they love McDonalds...so much so that the common term for it in French is "McDo's".
The French élite loves to condemn "Anglo-Saxon" business practices and so on, but far more people have been voting with their patronage. And I bet some members of the grandes-écoles educated élite sneak into "McDo's" every once in a while.
There are French restaurant chains, and especially bakery chains, but they are well-disguised with a common identity generally being avoided.
A few years ago in Annecy, I was shocked to find one of those in the centre-ville.
I hope they spell it Krispy Krème.
No doubt you've heard about the famous Marilyn Hagerty review of the Olive Garden in Grand Forks, North Dakota - Woman's Olive Garden Review Goes Viral
(As far as I can tell, she's now 96 and still writing!)
And yet Krispy Kreme and Tim Horton's both tried to get a foothold in Dunkin's home market of New England and were crushed. The popularity of the food item that was once part of its name may be down, but the brand is still strong. And I'd venture a guess that the doughnuts are more popular here than in other parts of the country, if only for the reason that there's little competition other than mom-and-pops and tiny regional operators.
When I lived in Ecuador and visited the US (about once every 2 to 3 months to Miami for parts and station stuff I could not get in Quito), I would do fast food for every meal. We had no fast foods in Quito back in the 60's, so a McDonalds or the like was as great as my favorite restaurant back home where the owner was a Swiss chef and they directly imported French wines.
Well, and in fairness, McDo's is rather different from McDonalds, American Style. I mean, just meeting the French requirements for food freshness and quality elevates that menu immeasurably, I would imagine (haven't gone yet) and I've seen online that they have things we don't.
I wondered about that. I did notice a gelato place that was clearly a chain.
Yeah, I drove past a couple in Nice.
Anything's better than what's going in across the street from CapRadio. It's a donut place called Holes. The banner went up last week---more information on Instagram @pickyourholes
If they think I'm typing THAT into an office computer...
Yeah, out west, there was a dominant chain for decades, Winchell's (in fact, they drove Dunkin' out back in the 60s). After the mid-70s, a lot of Cambodian refugees opened mom and pop donut shops and pretty much put Winchell's on the trailer (in fact, the largest of the Cambodian start-ups ended up buying the remnants of Winchell's and keeping the brand pretty much alive.
It's actually pretty fierce out here. I just put "donuts" in Yelp and there are ten places within five miles of my house, not counting grocery stores, old-school bakeries that do donuts and convenience markets.
Yes. No relation, but her husband had the same name as my dad---Jack Hagerty.
She turned 97 a couple of months ago and is still doing columns. Good for her and God bless her.