Here we go again with
one of my pet peeves: strip malls and the franchise operations that inhabit them. Thankful for Starbucks, McDonald's, 7-Elevens? Geez, somebody's got their priorities screwed up. Of course after a hard day, sometimes a nice reliable franchise is all you want, and all you need. Just gimme a burger, a cup of joe, and a slushee, and I'll be on my way. I think the thing that bugs me about these places, when I am not too tired to care, is that they spend all this money of building these fancy new buildings with their ridiculous overgrown facades, and then they pay their employees a pittance and grind them into the ground. If they just took care of the building they were in before, they wouldn't be having to build a new building, their costs would be lower, they could pay their employees more, and their products would be better. Of course it doesn't really work that way. Modern retail business depends on high volume. The price of the buildings, even a ridiculously fancy one, is small fraction of the cost of running the business. For restaurants the big cost is wages. And maintaining old buildings probably costs more than replacing them every 20 years or so.
Weird how
chains seems to be a
recurring theme in this blog.
Update January 2017 replaced missing image.
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