Now you’re just being silly. Everyone knows that the bears are boycotting Wal*Mart.
Sorry. I was just having a Kodiak moment.
I think chain restaurants are a terrible indicator for whether or not a city is a city. You might be able to come up with a rule of thumb for certain types of plases (ie steakhouse, downtown department store, etc.) but the idea that the absence of a Hard Rock Cafe means that a city is not a city is bizarre. Also, do Hard Rock Cafes still exist?
There’s also Cindi’s Deli, Cowboy Chicken, Blue Mesa, Mi Cocina (though now that I look, I see they are expanding nationally), Love and War in Texas, Sonny Bryans (though, again, I see they are expanding). . . that’s just off the top of my head. There are a bunch of them. These places look like chains, they feel like chains, but they really aren’t–though they may hope to be some day.
I just checked and it appears that there is a Hard Rock Cafe in Washington, DC on 10th and E, NW near Ford’s Theatre. For the most part, the places that a lot of people go to for dining aren’t going to be chains since they go to the suburbs for that and find parking.
I associate most of the things on that list with the suburbs as opposed to the city proper.
That being said, I just checked and with the exception of Ikea, I can find most of the items on the list in DC proper, although the Cheesecake Factory is a block from the border with Chevy Chase, MD. Dc does have a Target, and they are opening four Wal-Marts in DC, although they are going to use a much smaller plan than the ones that they built in the suburbs and the exurbs.
<<shudder>>
Oh yeah. And that’s exactly where I would expect to find one.
It pleases me to live in an almost entirely Starbucks-free zone. Barring one kiosk about nine miles one direction, the nearest is over fifteen miles away.
What I hate about them is that they drive out places that make good espresso.
Espresso at Starbucks can be described many ways, but “good” is not one of them.
That’s the megachain argument in a nutshell. They drive out local competition, good, bad and quirky, with corporate uniformity that is not going to meet every taste.
I drink my coffee plain black… and Starbucks’ is undrinkable overroasted char, good only for mixing 50% with ice-a-cream-a crap.
The DC metro area does not have this, which is actually kind of nice. The entire metro area is not trying to get to ONE SPOT in the center every morning. Yet, somehow our traffic still is one of the worst in the nation.
Don’t remind me about the Wal-Mart, one of them is going to be near us and is going to make traffic at Georgia and Military a nightmare.
Having said that, I don’t really consider DC a big city.
You see that everywhere though. Gates BBQ has several locations in KC, the Pappas restaraunts (Pappasito’s, Pappadeaux, etc…) started out as a local Houston chain, Torchy’s Tacos started in Austin as a food truck, Freebird’s Burrito started in College Station for all intents and purposes, Texadelphia started in Austin, and had one Houston location for the longest time, Ninfa’s is a predominantly Houston chain, the bar chains of Flying Saucer and Gingerman both started out in Dallas, and were 2-3 location local chains until very recently.
Some of them make it really big eventually; Chili’s was a Dallas chain, then branched out to Houston in the early 1980s, and moved nationwide not longer after that.
They are chains, just local chains. I think what you’re getting at is that they have similar uniformity to a national chain, but are still maybe 2-3 locations.
Well, for the US, it is the 7th largest metropolitan statistical area and the 4th largest combined statistical area (behind Chicago). Not sure what else is needed to make it “big.” Well, I guess that is what the thread is about.
Aside, but this gives me an opening to recommend David Brinkley’s* Washington at War* as a wonderful casual history of the transition of DC from a sleepy Southern town to the chaotic administrative center it is now.
Actually, somewhat counter-intuitively, a Starbucks moving into town tends to help the smaller coffee places, or at least that was the case when I was in the coffee biz last decade. Starbucks isn’t like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s moving in and undercutting everyone’s prices-- to the contrary they’re usually more expensive than local coffee shops and kiosks. They tend to create new gourmet coffee drinkers instead of attracting the existing ones, and so the local shops are a lot more likely to steal customers from them than the other way around, especially if they make better coffee is better than Starbucks (which is not difficult).
Oh, and for the purposes of this thread, I would propose Starbucks is a good marker for the town/small city divide, not the small city/big city divide.
Yeah, but most of that’s not DC, it’s the burbs around DC. DC itself is a small city and in a lot of ways kind a big small town.
As others have posted, most of the things on the OP list are things I associate with the suburbs, not with cities.
My point was that the presence of regional chains–as oppossed to the national and international chains in the OP–is evidence that a metro area is a certain size. You don’t get them in small towns or small cities: small towns have local places, but only one location. Small cities are dominated, IME, by big, national chains much more than big cities are. If you want the unique marker of a big city, it’s neither the big chains or the local joints–it’s the Goldilocks medium.
By the way, that was the rousing song in that great cartoon “A Canadian Tail.”
I think that the presence of certain chains can mean that a city has “arrived”. For example, I know that some people in Bozeman, MT were pretty excited to get an Olive Garden, which just recently opened.
This amused me, since in most places in America, no one is excited about Olive Garden anymore.
When I lived there over 20 years ago, we were constantly inundated with Red Lobster commercials. Where was the nearest Red Lobster? I have no idea. I don’t think Billings even had one then. The closest one was probably Minneapolis, about 1000 miles away. Google tells me Bozeman still doesn’t have a Red Lobster today! I bet there’s a bit pent-up demand if one ever shows up (and then they’ll find out Red Lobster sucks.)