Well, that explains the “regionalism” a little bit! 
Yay, all of them! No fast food/chain restaurants are allowed in our mostly-unsullied County. We don’t have any Stoplights either, but that’s another benefit altogether…
Your ‘too far’ driving distance is clearly much less than mine. While I wouldn’t drive 25 minutes to go to a particular fast food place, I’d certainly drive 25 minutes to hit a shop, visit a friend, or meet at a bar, and incidentally grab fast food while I’m in that area. My commute used to be 30 minutes, and 30-45 minute commutes are common where I am, so there are plenty of people looking to grab food more than 25 minutes from their home. There are also people who live an hour or two outside of town who will drive into on the weekends to shop at stores or go to events, and incidentally pick up food at some point on the trip. So I really don’t think the ‘30 miles’ or ‘25 minutes’ are unreasonable.
Their drinks are what you go to sonic for. Their real fruit slushes or limeades are great and they have a lot of options.
I don’t think that qualifies. Unless you think tv stations cater to a 15 mile radius.
All of them.
I live about 100 miles from St. Louis, in the middle of nowhere (it’s a 40-minute drive to the nearest stop light), and get the St. Louis stations on my satellite. Other than the most basic of fast food (McD’s, Taco Bell, etc.), which is still a 40-minute drive away, all fast food/restaurant commercials are wasted on me.
Olive Garden - Concord, Manchester, Portsmouth, Tyngsboro, Methuen
Outback Steakhouse - Seabrook, Bedford, Tyngsboro, Methuen
Carraba’s - Bedford, Peabody MA,
Cheesecake Factory - Burlington MA, Peabody MA
Sonic - Wilmington MA, Lynnfield MA, and apparently Lawrence MA (I only knew of Lynnfield)
Not all particularly close to where you may be in NH, but certainly in the Boston TV market, which includes the NH station (WMUR)
We have a Little Caesars in walking distance but they’ve stopped offering specialties like the bacon-wrapped crust and won’t even bother with the new smokehouse BBQ. The local Carraba’s closed, nearest one now is out past Wolf Trap.
Largo, down the Beltway from Golden Corral. Both of which are about 25 miles from us. Closer than Hardee’s though, need to go all the way to Baltimore or down to Quantico for one of those.
Um, virtually everything.
I think we have the burger places (Burger King, Mickie D’s, Wendy’s), Subway and a KFC in a 50 mile radius.
And that’s it.
I’ve lived in two areas with a Cheesecake Factory and never seen a commercial for them.
Checkers/Rally is no where me and they show the commercials here in Kansas City.
Until recently Dave and Busters was illegal in New Jersey. No really. Despite the fact that we have had casino gambling for decades it was illegal to have alcohol and amusement games under the same roof. We would get the D&B commercials because there are some in Pennsylvania. Last year the law changed and we are supposed to get a few here.
Same here – and I grew up in the New York City metro area, and I’ve lived in Chicago, California, Kansas, and now Wisconsin.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across the phrase “coffee shop” in my life! It sounds like a place to buy whole-bean coffee of various types, or maybe coffee-themed gifts? A “shop” is for shopping, not eating! Maybe I’ll start a thread about this.
You’re from Australia/New Zealand, but we have similar language quirks, you and I. To cite another one just from this (non-linguistic) thread, I thought the phrase “security theater” was pretty well known – lots of social-sciency popular magazine articles used it about ten years ago, when the post-9/11 travel world was solidifying and the TSA (and its equivalents in other countries) was starting to attract criticism.
It could be a generational thing. For someone born in the '60’s, being around people born earlier in the century, the terms “coffee shop” and “malt shop” were in common use around me. A coffee shop was a diner, same same.
Thanks. That sounds right.
Dominos closed nearly all their stores in LR in the mid 90’s. There were only two left in this area. Both at least 12 miles from me.
Yet their ads run daily. They’ve never stopped advertising.
I’ve written them off long ago. I just checked Google and am very surprised to see several new locations have opened here. Still none in my area of the city. No way am I driving 10 miles in heavy traffic just for a badly made pizza.
Special case for us English-speakers in Montreal. We’ll watch shows on the nearest American network affiliates in upstate Vermont and New York and catch commercials for stores and restaurants that do not operate in Canada. Oddly, the total market size for even a fraction of a major city like Montreal is probably greater than the total market of mostly-rural upstate New York and Vermont, so I kinda wonder why they don’t sell more advertising for products and services available on our side of the border. I suppose I should collect data on viewership - I might find out that I’m way off base - but in any case, the nearest Chili’s is a good hundred miles from here, and the only reason I even know that Chili’s is a thing is because I’ll have seen their commercials.