Huh? No matter what you call it, it’s still McDonald’s. It’s all a cheap, crappy fast-foodiness vibe. The McDonald’s I’ve eaten in Australia is no different from what I’ve eaten in Canada and the United States and the UK, except for the beetroot, and even then, you can exclude the beetroot, so a Big Mac in Sydney or Perth or Melbourne is the same as you’d get in Denver USA or Toronto Canada, or London UK.
If McDonald’s Australia wants to differentiate itself from the global brand, then it had better see how its franchisees feel. If they’re fine being McDonald’s as it is, great; but if they want to break away from the global brand, then they are no longer McDonald’s.
Heck, maybe the next time I’m in Australia, I’ll just stick with Hungry Jack’s.
Interesting route to that… IIRC the original Wally World was a screen name for a theme park, which in the original National Lampoon short story was DIsneyland. When they fimed National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation for some reason Disney would not consent to a movie using its name where the disgruntled tourist hunts down and shoots Walt Disney (in the original story). So the movie christened their fake park “Wally World” complete with a moose animal mascot - where everyone wore a hat with antlers on it…
It’s not hard to see how that would morph into a cute nickname for WalMart.
There’s the story about Eaton’s, a Canadian department store chain created by Timothy Eaton in the late 1800’s and then run into the ground by his descendants. The French language laws in Quebec a few decades ago fobade English signs, and the “apostrophe-S” was an English construct - so they removed the apostrophe and Eatons was now just a name, not a name in English.
That’s part of it - but another part is that for at least the first few years the park was open , it wasn’t owned by Six Flags. And people who went to the park during those years didn’t really stop calling it “Great Adventure” - my contemporaries and I were still calling it “Great Adventure” in the late '90s even as our kids (born in the late 80s early 90s) called it “Six Flags” because that was what they saw on TV. Which drove me nuts because then I had to ask “Which Six Flags”? ( we had passes and went to three or four of their parks in any given year)
When I was a kid in the 1960s it was referred to as “Six Flags Over Georgia”. I never heard anybody call it “Great Adventure” and the “Over Georgia” part was nearly always included. There was an even older one in Texas but those were the only two, I believe. Later, they opened one in Indiana or Illinois or thereabouts and it had the awkward title “Six Flags Over Mid-America”.
The gimmick was that there really had been six flags that had officially flown there (definitely in Texas: Spain, Mexico, independent Texas, Britain, United States, and the Confederacy; it was more of a stretch to come up with six flags for Georgia — I think they counted France and the Georgia state flag which is kind of cheating) and I have no idea what they did for Mid-America. After that, when they added additional sites, there was no pretense or claim about six flags having flown there.
The one in New Jersey didn’t exist yet. ETA: and I didn’t click the up-arrow to read the post to which doreen was replying and forgot it was specific to the New Jersey park. I never knew it was originally called Great Adventure although now I realize I’ve heard the phrase.
The reason, of course, was that the New Jersey park was called Great Adventure before Six Flags bought them. Their park now called Six Flags New England was called Riverside Park when I was a kid.
Yeah. Back in the late 1960s and 1970s there were fixed thrill-ride amusement parks being built all over the country, each started by various individual operators, but all broadly similar in scope and concept.
Then somebody created a holding company called “Six Flags” who began buying up many of the smaller operators and rebranding them from “[Whatever]” to “Six Flags over [Whatever]”.
Depending on whether your were a kid when your nearest park was named “[Whatever]”, was recently renamed to “Six Flags over [Whatever]”, or had been called “Six Flags over [Whatever]” since before you knew they existed will determine what you think the “correct” name is.
I think the problem is that it’s hard to know what brands are currently in the “nickname but not embraced” phase of their existence. Brands changing because of this phenomenon are fairly well known (or because of mergers, political rebranding, etc. which also isn’t what the OP asked.
I interpret the OP as being, essentially, what brands have a common nickname. If we identify one today and the name hits marketing tomorrow it no longer fits!
Very interesting, and thanks for the insight and back story. I wonder how many other businesses ended up taking the “if you can’t beat them, join them” route, conceding to the practice of official renaming due to the public’s use of in-formalities.
Some stations were also called Humble Oil after Standard Oil bought a controlling interest. As a kid I would still see stations that had an Exxon sign on the pole but Humble written on the building.
I suspect the reason is that all the stations in Canada were Esso stations. They didn’t need to find one name (Exxon) to use for all the Esso, Enco, Humble stations. They were restricted from using the name Esso in some areas in the US.
