Q1: Here in suburbia, except for ABsleaze, Hard Rock Cafe, and that repellent “Cheers” place you see in airports, free-standing bars seem to be independently conceived, owned and run. How come?
Q2: Are there other kinds of mainstream stores or service industries that have yet to be taken over by weed species? (I say mainstream to eliminate fringey stuff like thrift stores, pawn shops and head shops–besides bars are there any still-real places left that can get the straights to leave the mall?) (Asian restaurants might count…?)
I dunno. Aside from a slight nod to kids’ fare to entice families, I’d call Applebees, Ruby Tuesday, Houlihan’s and a few others chain taverns. TGIF doesn’t even cater much to the kids. If you’re talking about a place that serves only liquor and reluctantly gives you a sandwich, they are probably not seen as very profitable by the folks that package cookie-cutter food distribution.
My personal take, being a bar hound, is that people go to a particular tavern because of its individuality. Bars have personalities. Each of the three joints I regularly hang out in are unique, and each one caters to a different mood/mindset in me.
That’s not something you can homogenize and distill into something franchise-able, I don’t think.
Other mainstream businesses that aren’t chains - dry cleaners?
The need for perceived individuality by the clientele is an important point.
I think anybody who wants to franchise a bar operation will mutate it into something like TGIFriday’s. You probably don’t get the margins and scalable operations you need without an extensive food menu.
Also, being able to class yourself as a “restaurant” is probably easier legally. If you are really just a bar, you are going to have major headaches with the wide variation in licensing and liquor laws from state to state. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some jurisdictions where a franchised bar, with headquarters outside the jurisdiction, would be, for all practical purposes, legally impossible.
There ARE some “local chains” in a lot of places - I go to a place called the “Britannia Arms” which has a handful of different locations in the South Bay and Santa Cruz area.
At what point does an business which starts having multiple locations become a “chain”?
I’ll echo what FallenAngel said - I will utterly refuse to go have a drink in “Professor PJ Cornucopia’s Fantastic Foodmagorium and Great American Steakery” type places. In fact, I generally avoid local brewery bars for the same reason, like Gordon Biersch here in SF - they’re just too assembly-line-like. I much prefer buying my drink from “Mike” the bartender at the Wishing Well who has been there for thirty years and he’ll smoke wherever he damn well pleases and there aren’t any damn specials and get out if you don’t like it and SHUT THE DOOR DAMMIT!!
Yeah, there’s a big difference between Buddy’s Bagel Nosh with a few branches in the vicinity and, say, Brueggers. When is full-on chainness to be declared? When Buddy becomes a corporation?
TGIFridays et al seem to me to be a different thing than the thing I mean. They’re restaurant bars. You can eat a full meal there and you can’t rock out. I meant freestanding bars–places with loud music, no food, lots of smokers, no children, people might dance, huge lines for the bathroom, raucous drunkenness–you don’t see these phenomena in Appleby’s, at least not the one I’ve been in. Those places still seem to be mainly independent.
That state liquor laws thing makes sense: I bet that’s it.
Don’t people want individuality in restaurants, too, though? Individuality is particularly important in a restaurant because you want the people who run the place to know how to cook and have ideas so that you’re not always eating the same stuff everywhere you go. I mean, when are we going to tire of the blooming onion? We’ve had them around for 10+ years; I wanna eat something else.
Yeah, drycleaners. And laundromats, although those are seeming increasingly fringey.
Admitted. But when I talk to the owner, he classes himself as a “bar owner”, they do a fair amount of their business after shutting down the kitchen and around televised sporting events, and they have live music on the weekends. You’ll see an occasional kid in tow early in the evening, but it’s largely an adult crowd, and a lot of them are just drinking, not eating. I’d typify them as a neighborhood bar and grill operation of the “Americanized British Pub” subgenre.
Which underscores the original point that real hole-in-the-wall bars don’t become chains, I guess.
I’ve read (much of it in mystery novels) about how British pubs are being taken over by the brewing companies. They get made over into faux Tudor or too-too contemporary types and sound pretty unappetizing. Maybe the beer companies find they can monopolize the pubs and sell only their brands and make more money that way.
The beer companies don’t try that here because the country’s too large for a strategy to have much effect. Imagine how many bars they’d have to buy in one area, and what would happen if Joe Sixpax comes in looking for his usual Stroh’s and finds only six varieties of Bud instead.
Also, companies would gain the usual effect you see when banks and bookstores consolidated. You can’t buy 20 bars and realize any savings by cutting staff. Not even if you get a discount buying in bulk (and, maybe here, liquor laws don’t allow that kind of competitive advantage).
I do see bar chains that number a few. Either a few in one city or One in a few cities. Sometimes, the bars have different names. For example (discussions of the different bar chains would be a great non-gq thread), Houston has Serlock’s, with about 4 locations. Gingerman, with one in Houston, Austin, and Manhattan. Sliante, which I hear is a chain of irish-theme bars with different names in each city.
Have you people forgotten hooters? Or is that to low-brow? It’s more of a bar than any TGIFridays or Outback. You DO see people drunker than a skunk there. Its a bar, its a chain, its your answer.
Hooters is certainly a chain. We have: watering down of the original concept to something blandly palatable; ubiquitous cute-joke-on-the-side-of-the-bus advertising; bizarre outfits on the staff (orange plastic shorts and pantyhose: cewl). Hooters is what happened because somebody wished they could franchise a strip club. The result is a sportsbar-and-restaurant exactly like TGIFridays with a slightly heavier emphasis on TVs and orange shorts and owl-eyes T-shirts instead of suspenders and a million badge-a-minit buttons on the servers.
Here in the UK we have many chains of bars. I suspect that the reason we have them and the US doesn’t is that the British brewing industry had large estates of pubs that it already owned. Thus it is quite easy to convert a pub to a chain format. Again they tend to be aimed at the food trade, and in another trend, also aimed at young women. It may help that we have pretty uniform licensing laws on a country by country basis.
However I can’t see why someone like grand met or Diego can’t set up chain bars.
Incidentally our chain bars are usually souless establishments in the middle of towns full of under 25s who are too drunk to stand up.
A lot of things go on in the management of certain types of businesses that big corporations are ill-equipped to handle.
For example, a bar owner can take a “five finger discount” on his taxes by taking a couple 20s out of the register and stuffing them in his pocket. It is much harder for a corporation to cheat without leaving a paper-trail.
In addition, consider the main advantages of a chain: (1) customers can walk in “cold” and know exactly what to expect; (2) more resources can be put into advertising; (3) economies of scale in administrative costs; (4) economies of scale in buying product for resale.
Most bars depend heavily on repeat business, which largely neutralizes (1) and (2). (Note that bars in airports frequently ARE “chain” bars.) Adminstrative costs are low, and margins are big enough that a couple bucks less for a case of vodka or a keg of beer possibly won’t make much of a difference.
[Jennifer Aniston]I don’t really wanna talk about my flair.[/Jennifer Aniston]
BW3 (although it’s now called something else, I think) has been a fairly successful “chain bar”. They do focus significantly on food but most of their locations are at least partially over-21, and the atmosphere in those areas is most definitely “sports bar”.
I was going to mention BW-3s as well, but in the midwest we also have Fox & the Hound restaurant/bars, with a large emphasis on the booze. I haven’t seen too many, but there is one in Indianapolis and Cleveland. I think Chicago has one as well.
In my travels throughout the country, chain bars include …
Buffalo Wild Wings - really more college bar than restaurant
Chelsea Street Station - serves food, but really more of a bar
Houlihan’s - the most bar-like of the Irish pub theme restaurants
Fado - upscale Celtic pub, in many larger cities
Howl at the Moon Saloon
Shooters - waterfront party bars in several cities
Old Chicago - mostly in Colorado
Still, there’s no equivalent of the corner pub; i.e., the equivalent of a hundred “Kowalski’s Bar and Grill” like places.
There are chain pawn shops (Cash America) and thrift stores (Goodwill, Amvets). Supposedly, the “Lucky Happy China Dragon Palace” carry-out Chinese places are franchised – each outlet has a different name but shares menus, recipes and business formulas.