Monthly Archives: March 2002

Big city community

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From an interview with Naomi Wolf in the Jan/Feb Utne Reader: “Large cities can be really wonderful and community-based places to raise children, partly because you are away from the tyranny of automobiles. I love that in this city kids can run in and out of stores where they know the storekeepers, and they see a wide variety of people on the street… I found that the suburban environment is especially isolating for women and the children they care for.”

chicken shacks

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And from an old Straight Dope: “the most baffling corporate numbering scheme in American business today, namely Harold’s Chicken Shack… there are a half dozen unnumbered chicken shacks, all presumably vying for the honor of number 1, followed by numbers 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14B, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27, 29, 35, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 65, and 71. Noting the numerous lacunae in this scheme, one wonders: Is there an unusually high attrition rate in the chicken shack business (the south side is, after all, the baddest part of town), or did Harold just lose track?” Apparently, the franchisees don’t have a very good success rate: one source says that there once were more Chicken Shacks, and that numbers seem to be retired with the Shack in question.

$B everywhere

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This is mildly frightening: someone’s visited 83% of the Starbucks in North America, and photographed all of them. On the one hand, it’s somewhat neat to see all the diverse urban environments of North America, but it’s equally disconcerting to see them all stamped with that tidy green logo. Eeeech. At least $bux hasn’t turned to “shrieking dance squads” to sell coffee. Yet.