How I learned why people choose to eat at Chain Restaurants
By Amy Joan Lamoreaux
A few decades ago, I owned and operated a retail store, right on the main street in a small town in Michigan. It always seemed to be a never ending battle for survival, competing with the Big Chain stores. It is the same fight that independent entrepreneurs are still waging in small towns throughout America today. The never ending David and Goliath story.
Having walked in those shoes I feel a camaraderie with small town merchants and independent retail operators. Therefore, I try to support my local hometown merchants whenever possible.
It is easy for me to throw my support to my town’s independent restaurant owners, as I personally know most of them and vice versa. I also think that the quality of their food can be far superior to the chain restaurants.
I carry that kind of thinking with me as I travel. If possible, I will confer with a local resident or perhaps a concierge to get a tip on a good place to eat. The other part to my thinking on preferring independent restaurants is that traveling, in my opinion, should be about experiencing something different than you can do at home. Typically speaking, chain restaurants are the same wherever you go, very predictable. No adventure there.
On a family road trip from our home in mid-Michigan to visit my husband Paul’s family in Southwest Missouri, I had one of the more unusual dining experiences of my life. It was nearing lunch time and I was starved. I suggested we find a local family restaurant where there was sure to be something on the menu that everyone could pick, either breakfast or lunch. I knew that if the decision was left up to my 13 year old twin boys, Nick and Alex, they would have selected a fast food burger type joint. My husband and I are more inclined to opt for a sit down family style meal, something possibly a little healthier than fast food fare.
Traveling down the interstate, we watched the billboards for an eating establishment that appeared to have convenient access, meaning in close proximity to the exit. We passed several restaurants that I thought looked satisfactory but were vetoed by the other family members. The billboards were getting fewer and farther between and we then found ourselves forced to make a decision from the limited choices as the scenery was reverting to mostly cow pasture. According to our map, the next town was quite some distance from where we were and I was by then hungry enough to consider gnawing off my own arm.
I spotted a billboard for a restaurant that looked like a well established, been part of the community for many years, family style diner. The sign touted the fact that they served breakfast anytime. This place seemed perfect. We pulled off the interstate and found a local restaurant on the right, but the name didn’t match the one on the sign. Looking down the road, we saw our destination, the Bell Restaurant.
Situated on a corner, the limited parking in front of the restaurant was full. This might have been a sign of good food. We pulled over to a side street and parked. I opened the door to the Bell Restaurant, optimistically excited about an adventure in dining with my family.
Standing inside the entrance, my initial impression was less than favorable. The place was full of cigarette smoke. After my eyes adjusted to looking through the smoky fog, I tried to determine whether there was even a place suitable for us to sit down. The rectangular shaped dining room was almost full. Along the wall on the road side were 5 molded booths. Across from that was a Formica lunch counter with round swivel seats bolted to the floor. I thought, “This diner’s counter and accompanying chairs have been here since well before 1950!” There were a few spots open at the counter and an open booth, but everyone except the wait staff was smoking in this room. That included the guy at the end of the counter who possessed that unique talent of being able to eat and smoke at the same time.
I spotted a back room with a sign that indicated that there was a non-smoking dining area. The four of us made a bee-line through the smoke to the next room. That room, though sparse, at least was adequate and non-smoking. I scanned the list of daily specials, and like many family eateries, there were a slew of them. Mimicking a technique my mom taught me, I discreetly looked at the food on other patrons’ plates to see whether there was something that I might like to order. The waitress was also walking by us with two plates of steaming food that definitely looked like good old fashioned delicious home cooked fare. I was thinking that I had picked a winner.
Since we had been on a long car trip, I didn’t relish the thought of sitting down right away, so I decided to stand up behind my seat and give my legs a chance to stretch out. I selected something to order off the special board and decided to visit the ladies’ room while my family was mulling over their food choices. I remembered seeing a sign for the bathroom at the far end of the first dining room and headed in that direction.
When I stepped back into that smoke filled dining area, I felt like I was entering another world. The diners were mostly men who looked like they had just hopped off their horses from riding the range. My mom would say that this was “where the elite meet,” referring to a place that was favored by regular folks. Many of the dozen or more patrons, donned cowboy hats, tilted their heads to check me out. I suddenly felt very out of place. It wasn’t that my attire was outlandish. I had on comfortable traveling clothes, blue jeans and a comfy sweater. I thought maybe that, perhaps, it was because not many outsiders ventured into Bell’s. My husband remarked later that he thought it was interesting that even though we had traveled half way around the world, it took being in the Ozark Mountains in Southwest Missouri to feel out of place.
When I finally got to the ladies’ room, I found it sparsely decorated. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t decorated at all. Though it was a large, high ceiling room, it was equipped with nothing more than a toilet, a sink, and a counter. I was grateful that the lighting was poor because I wasn’t sure I wanted to see everything very clearly.
Getting down to business, I assumed the hovering squat position which is the preferred technique for doing Number One by women using public facilities everywhere. This method insures the least likelihood of coming into physical contact with anything. It also has a second benefit of helping to tone one’s thigh muscles.
Exiting the stall, I made my way to the sink, relieved to find some soap in the dilapidated dispenser. There also was a roll of paper towels sitting on end on the counter. As I washed my hands, I noticed a sign that was a little larger than a bumper sticker, posted behind the faucet. It read:
Washing your hands may prevent the spread of disease.
Missouri Department of Health.
I had to read it again to make sure that I had read it correctly. May prevent? Ha Ha, very funny. That was a good one. The next thing I expected to see was a sign that read:
The Earth is flat.
Class of 1491.
I look around for the sign that is required to be posted in restaurants that reads: “Employees must wash their hands before returning to work,” and there wasn’t one. Ok, now this was getting kind of weird. I glanced up to the high ceiling, looking for a hidden camera, just to make sure that I hadn’t landed on Candid Camera.
I consider myself an exceptionally brave diner, having ordered fried chicken gizzards and livers at the family restaurant the night before, and still alive to tell about it. I decided to not let a lack of signage spoil my lunch. After all, I knew that my mom probably didn’t wash her hands after changing every baby’s diaper and then went back to making dinner and all seven of her kids survived.
I made my way back through the smoky front dining and noticed that some of the patrons that I thought were cowboys were actually cowgirls. I started to think that I may have stepped into the twilight zone.
Returning to my seat, the waitress was there and took our orders. Two of us ordered lunch and two of us ordered dinner. Perfect! Everyone found something they liked. Since I got something off the daily special board, in true Southern style, it came with about 20 side dishes which the waitress started bringing right away. Good thing because I was starved and dug right into my food.
The rest of the food came and it looked delicious. Before some of us ate our meals, we took the time to fix some of the food by passing around the salt and pepper, or adding butter to biscuits or potatoes.
Since my son Alex had ordered pancakes, he grabbed the syrup. Being left handed, he poured the syrup opposite than right handers, starting to dispense from the side of plate closest to him, allowing the stream to flow towards the center of the table. Since this made the end of the flow visible to the whole table, we all watched in horror as a large unknown black object poured out of the container on to the top of his stack of pancakes.
Everyone at the table stopped what they were doing to look at what it might be. At first look, it appeared to be a common house fly. We were all disgusted. Paul, Nick and I, immediately looked down at our own plates to make sure there wasn’t anything equally disgusting hiding there.
Poor Alex had the most pitiful expression on his face. Not seeing the waitress within shouting distance, I asked Paul to quickly remove Alex’s plate and take it to the kitchen. The waitress promptly returned to our table, appropriately apologetic, and asked Alex if she could get him something else. He hesitated, rightfully so, and then decided that he’d have some hash brown potatoes only.
After she left, I noticed that the syrup container was still on the table and beseeched Paul to get that off the table and take it to the kitchen, too. He kindly grabbed it right away and disappeared towards the kitchen for a bit. Upon returning, I asked him what the cook said about this, wondering if she was apologetic as well. Paul said the cook would not even touch the syrup container. She had told Paul that the syrup containers were the responsibility of the waitress, and not the kitchen, and to give it to the waitress.
I was dumbfounded by the cook’s reaction as I was sure she would have at least said that she was sorry about the fly thing, even though it wasn’t her fault. Apparently she felt that it was more important to convey the delineation of jobs at Bell’s and for us to understand that Paul’s request did not fall within her job description. Customer satisfaction must not have been in her job description either.
We decided that we should finish our meals as quickly as possible and get the heck out of there. I suddenly detected a strong smell of cigarette smoke, as though it was coming from the table right behind me. I turned to look, and almost everyone in the non-smoking dining room, having finished their meals, had lit one up. We must have been the only people in this restaurant who actually believed the non-smoking sign meant anything.
I wondered why everyone in the restaurant smoked. Maybe the non-smokers just gave up and gave in to the thinking that they might as well smoke, because the second hand smoke was going to kill them anyway. There was simply no way to get away from the smoke. Perhaps they had concluded that if they lit up their own ciggies, they could at least get the full satisfaction of the smoking experience.
When we finally left the restaurant, I noticed heading back to our car that we all smelled like we had stepped out of a bar. That was really not the impression that I was aiming for when meeting my Southern Baptist Mother-in-Law later that day.
As we drove down the road, I was already trying to look at the bright side of the experience. I told Alex, that though this might not seem so funny to him right then, some day he would look back at the experience and laugh. That’s when Alex informed me that the big black glob that fell out of the syrup was not a fly, but a prehistoric looking cockroach type bug.
“Oh, sure, tell me that now,” I thought. It was all fun and games until I heard “cockroach”. Now, I could kind of see excusing the fly in the syrup container. After all, they do fly and are attracted to sweets. And when eating alfresco, a person chances getting flying insects in the food. But, there is no way the cockroach flew into the syrup container.
As my mind travelled to the land of “what ifs” I was suddenly not so sure that I should have eaten my whole meal. There was silence in the car for many miles while some of us were trying to come to terms with Alex’s revelation. I should have known that a restaurant whose only bathroom signage was pointing out that washing your hands could possibly, maybe, prevent the spread of disease, had not yet heard about the direct connection between cockroaches and diseases either.
After some time and distance had passed between us and Bell Restaurant, I was feeling a little more confidant that we had not been exposed to the plague, or worse. Once the memory of the cockroach began to fade, our sense of humor slowly started to return and we were finally able to laugh about it all. However, it then became clear to me why so many people choose to eat at chain restaurants.
By Amy Joan Lamoreaux
A few decades ago, I owned and operated a retail store, right on the main street in a small town in Michigan. It always seemed to be a never ending battle for survival, competing with the Big Chain stores. It is the same fight that independent entrepreneurs are still waging in small towns throughout America today. The never ending David and Goliath story.
Having walked in those shoes I feel a camaraderie with small town merchants and independent retail operators. Therefore, I try to support my local hometown merchants whenever possible.
It is easy for me to throw my support to my town’s independent restaurant owners, as I personally know most of them and vice versa. I also think that the quality of their food can be far superior to the chain restaurants.
I carry that kind of thinking with me as I travel. If possible, I will confer with a local resident or perhaps a concierge to get a tip on a good place to eat. The other part to my thinking on preferring independent restaurants is that traveling, in my opinion, should be about experiencing something different than you can do at home. Typically speaking, chain restaurants are the same wherever you go, very predictable. No adventure there.
On a family road trip from our home in mid-Michigan to visit my husband Paul’s family in Southwest Missouri, I had one of the more unusual dining experiences of my life. It was nearing lunch time and I was starved. I suggested we find a local family restaurant where there was sure to be something on the menu that everyone could pick, either breakfast or lunch. I knew that if the decision was left up to my 13 year old twin boys, Nick and Alex, they would have selected a fast food burger type joint. My husband and I are more inclined to opt for a sit down family style meal, something possibly a little healthier than fast food fare.
Traveling down the interstate, we watched the billboards for an eating establishment that appeared to have convenient access, meaning in close proximity to the exit. We passed several restaurants that I thought looked satisfactory but were vetoed by the other family members. The billboards were getting fewer and farther between and we then found ourselves forced to make a decision from the limited choices as the scenery was reverting to mostly cow pasture. According to our map, the next town was quite some distance from where we were and I was by then hungry enough to consider gnawing off my own arm.
I spotted a billboard for a restaurant that looked like a well established, been part of the community for many years, family style diner. The sign touted the fact that they served breakfast anytime. This place seemed perfect. We pulled off the interstate and found a local restaurant on the right, but the name didn’t match the one on the sign. Looking down the road, we saw our destination, the Bell Restaurant.
Situated on a corner, the limited parking in front of the restaurant was full. This might have been a sign of good food. We pulled over to a side street and parked. I opened the door to the Bell Restaurant, optimistically excited about an adventure in dining with my family.
Standing inside the entrance, my initial impression was less than favorable. The place was full of cigarette smoke. After my eyes adjusted to looking through the smoky fog, I tried to determine whether there was even a place suitable for us to sit down. The rectangular shaped dining room was almost full. Along the wall on the road side were 5 molded booths. Across from that was a Formica lunch counter with round swivel seats bolted to the floor. I thought, “This diner’s counter and accompanying chairs have been here since well before 1950!” There were a few spots open at the counter and an open booth, but everyone except the wait staff was smoking in this room. That included the guy at the end of the counter who possessed that unique talent of being able to eat and smoke at the same time.
I spotted a back room with a sign that indicated that there was a non-smoking dining area. The four of us made a bee-line through the smoke to the next room. That room, though sparse, at least was adequate and non-smoking. I scanned the list of daily specials, and like many family eateries, there were a slew of them. Mimicking a technique my mom taught me, I discreetly looked at the food on other patrons’ plates to see whether there was something that I might like to order. The waitress was also walking by us with two plates of steaming food that definitely looked like good old fashioned delicious home cooked fare. I was thinking that I had picked a winner.
Since we had been on a long car trip, I didn’t relish the thought of sitting down right away, so I decided to stand up behind my seat and give my legs a chance to stretch out. I selected something to order off the special board and decided to visit the ladies’ room while my family was mulling over their food choices. I remembered seeing a sign for the bathroom at the far end of the first dining room and headed in that direction.
When I stepped back into that smoke filled dining area, I felt like I was entering another world. The diners were mostly men who looked like they had just hopped off their horses from riding the range. My mom would say that this was “where the elite meet,” referring to a place that was favored by regular folks. Many of the dozen or more patrons, donned cowboy hats, tilted their heads to check me out. I suddenly felt very out of place. It wasn’t that my attire was outlandish. I had on comfortable traveling clothes, blue jeans and a comfy sweater. I thought maybe that, perhaps, it was because not many outsiders ventured into Bell’s. My husband remarked later that he thought it was interesting that even though we had traveled half way around the world, it took being in the Ozark Mountains in Southwest Missouri to feel out of place.
When I finally got to the ladies’ room, I found it sparsely decorated. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t decorated at all. Though it was a large, high ceiling room, it was equipped with nothing more than a toilet, a sink, and a counter. I was grateful that the lighting was poor because I wasn’t sure I wanted to see everything very clearly.
Getting down to business, I assumed the hovering squat position which is the preferred technique for doing Number One by women using public facilities everywhere. This method insures the least likelihood of coming into physical contact with anything. It also has a second benefit of helping to tone one’s thigh muscles.
Exiting the stall, I made my way to the sink, relieved to find some soap in the dilapidated dispenser. There also was a roll of paper towels sitting on end on the counter. As I washed my hands, I noticed a sign that was a little larger than a bumper sticker, posted behind the faucet. It read:
Washing your hands may prevent the spread of disease.
Missouri Department of Health.
I had to read it again to make sure that I had read it correctly. May prevent? Ha Ha, very funny. That was a good one. The next thing I expected to see was a sign that read:
The Earth is flat.
Class of 1491.
I look around for the sign that is required to be posted in restaurants that reads: “Employees must wash their hands before returning to work,” and there wasn’t one. Ok, now this was getting kind of weird. I glanced up to the high ceiling, looking for a hidden camera, just to make sure that I hadn’t landed on Candid Camera.
I consider myself an exceptionally brave diner, having ordered fried chicken gizzards and livers at the family restaurant the night before, and still alive to tell about it. I decided to not let a lack of signage spoil my lunch. After all, I knew that my mom probably didn’t wash her hands after changing every baby’s diaper and then went back to making dinner and all seven of her kids survived.
I made my way back through the smoky front dining and noticed that some of the patrons that I thought were cowboys were actually cowgirls. I started to think that I may have stepped into the twilight zone.
Returning to my seat, the waitress was there and took our orders. Two of us ordered lunch and two of us ordered dinner. Perfect! Everyone found something they liked. Since I got something off the daily special board, in true Southern style, it came with about 20 side dishes which the waitress started bringing right away. Good thing because I was starved and dug right into my food.
The rest of the food came and it looked delicious. Before some of us ate our meals, we took the time to fix some of the food by passing around the salt and pepper, or adding butter to biscuits or potatoes.
Since my son Alex had ordered pancakes, he grabbed the syrup. Being left handed, he poured the syrup opposite than right handers, starting to dispense from the side of plate closest to him, allowing the stream to flow towards the center of the table. Since this made the end of the flow visible to the whole table, we all watched in horror as a large unknown black object poured out of the container on to the top of his stack of pancakes.
Everyone at the table stopped what they were doing to look at what it might be. At first look, it appeared to be a common house fly. We were all disgusted. Paul, Nick and I, immediately looked down at our own plates to make sure there wasn’t anything equally disgusting hiding there.
Poor Alex had the most pitiful expression on his face. Not seeing the waitress within shouting distance, I asked Paul to quickly remove Alex’s plate and take it to the kitchen. The waitress promptly returned to our table, appropriately apologetic, and asked Alex if she could get him something else. He hesitated, rightfully so, and then decided that he’d have some hash brown potatoes only.
After she left, I noticed that the syrup container was still on the table and beseeched Paul to get that off the table and take it to the kitchen, too. He kindly grabbed it right away and disappeared towards the kitchen for a bit. Upon returning, I asked him what the cook said about this, wondering if she was apologetic as well. Paul said the cook would not even touch the syrup container. She had told Paul that the syrup containers were the responsibility of the waitress, and not the kitchen, and to give it to the waitress.
I was dumbfounded by the cook’s reaction as I was sure she would have at least said that she was sorry about the fly thing, even though it wasn’t her fault. Apparently she felt that it was more important to convey the delineation of jobs at Bell’s and for us to understand that Paul’s request did not fall within her job description. Customer satisfaction must not have been in her job description either.
We decided that we should finish our meals as quickly as possible and get the heck out of there. I suddenly detected a strong smell of cigarette smoke, as though it was coming from the table right behind me. I turned to look, and almost everyone in the non-smoking dining room, having finished their meals, had lit one up. We must have been the only people in this restaurant who actually believed the non-smoking sign meant anything.
I wondered why everyone in the restaurant smoked. Maybe the non-smokers just gave up and gave in to the thinking that they might as well smoke, because the second hand smoke was going to kill them anyway. There was simply no way to get away from the smoke. Perhaps they had concluded that if they lit up their own ciggies, they could at least get the full satisfaction of the smoking experience.
When we finally left the restaurant, I noticed heading back to our car that we all smelled like we had stepped out of a bar. That was really not the impression that I was aiming for when meeting my Southern Baptist Mother-in-Law later that day.
As we drove down the road, I was already trying to look at the bright side of the experience. I told Alex, that though this might not seem so funny to him right then, some day he would look back at the experience and laugh. That’s when Alex informed me that the big black glob that fell out of the syrup was not a fly, but a prehistoric looking cockroach type bug.
“Oh, sure, tell me that now,” I thought. It was all fun and games until I heard “cockroach”. Now, I could kind of see excusing the fly in the syrup container. After all, they do fly and are attracted to sweets. And when eating alfresco, a person chances getting flying insects in the food. But, there is no way the cockroach flew into the syrup container.
As my mind travelled to the land of “what ifs” I was suddenly not so sure that I should have eaten my whole meal. There was silence in the car for many miles while some of us were trying to come to terms with Alex’s revelation. I should have known that a restaurant whose only bathroom signage was pointing out that washing your hands could possibly, maybe, prevent the spread of disease, had not yet heard about the direct connection between cockroaches and diseases either.
After some time and distance had passed between us and Bell Restaurant, I was feeling a little more confidant that we had not been exposed to the plague, or worse. Once the memory of the cockroach began to fade, our sense of humor slowly started to return and we were finally able to laugh about it all. However, it then became clear to me why so many people choose to eat at chain restaurants.