Tartan 'Tat' Empire Spreads Again

[davedove]

As long as the consumer is looking for the cheapest price regardless of quality, we will continue down this long slide.

There is certainly a lot of truth to that, but it's not the whole truth. I think it's more a factor of getting a "known" level of quality. For instance, take McDonalds. I doubt if very many people would claim it's high quality, but every time you go in you know what the quality will be, no matter where you are. You can't say that about a local place. With a local place, it might be the best you ever had, or it could be really bad.

[arrScott]

Guys, as someone currently sitting in India, I can tell you that the experience listed by Hamish above and decried by others is not limited just to Scotland. I am most disappointed that the homogenization of the world is occurring. Having traveled the world and found a Dunkin Donuts in the old city of Prague and finding a McDonald's on Red Square in Moscow, to finding a Pizza Hut, KFC and McDonald's in Hyderabad. Local charm and flavor is disappearing to make way for ease of use and the quick dollar. It is a shame really. And to make matters worse, we do it to ourselves. As long as the consumer is looking for the cheapest price regardless of quality, we will continue down this long slide.

I used to agree with this -- and in fact I still kind of do, in as much as I'm still a total anti-Wal-Mart snob -- but now I'm not so sure. Having lived and traveled abroad quite a bit this last decade, I'm not so sure this is such a bad thing.

I mean, if I could have my choice, would I choose to put a TGI Friday's in the ground floor of my favorite bed & breakfast in Edinbugh? No, for purely aesthetic reasons. Have I ever set foot inside that Friday's? No. Will I ever? No. Has the presence of the Friday's ever stopped me from going to the modern Scottish pub next door where the crowd is mostly locals? No.

And my experience living in Europe earlier this decade gave me a pretty positive view of McDonald's and its ilk, actually. Not for the food -- I eat at McD's rarely enough in America; I'm certainly not going to visit the Golden Arches in another country. But in, say, the Netherlands and Belgium and northern Germany and the smaller towns in England, Scotland, and Ireland I lived in or visited, I found the following phenomenon.

Where there was no McDonald's or similar American chain fast-food restaurant, inexpensive lunch cafes tended to be on the level of an elderly couple making cold-cut sandwiches using grocery-store-bought sliced bread, cold cuts, and maybe some wilted lettuce. Terrible food, and generally more expensive than what McDonald's would offer.

Where there was a McDonald's or similar American chain fast-food restaurant nearby, bad-but-overpriced cafes seemed to have been cleared from the market. You could either get cheaper, worse food than McD's, such as at the Febo automats of Amsterdam, or you could get slightly pricier, better food than McD's at the many thriving, local cafes.

Which is to say, I found it to be universally true in northwestern Europe that the presence of McDonald's in an area was a good thing for consumers, at least as long as you didn't actually eat at the McDonald's. The Golden Arches established a very positive price and quality bottom line in the marketplace. I mean, in my neighborhood in Amsterdam, there were maybe three American chain fast-food restaurants, including a McDonald's. There were also a couple hundred locally owned, independent cafes, restaurants, and food-serving bars within walking distance, and the worst of them were still pretty darn good. In towns with little or no competition from American fast food, the local restaurants had a much lower average of quality and value.

And although I'm a total book-nut, I've also come around on the big-box bookstores. I used to spend hours in Baxter's Books in downtown Minneapolis as a teenager and a young man. Best bookstore in the upper Midwest. Compared to the mall bookstores of the 1980s and early '90s, it was like book heaven. Wide selection, thoughtful salespeople, always on the lookout for the quirky novels and oddball histories and whatnot that the little bestseller stands in the airport would never touch. I was really upset when the encroachment of Border's and Barnes and Noble finally made Mr. Baxter give up before being driven completely out of business.

But it turns out that my local big-B bookstore has a much wider selection, carries more copies of even the most obscure books, and pays its staff higher wages with better bennies than Baxter's. When I order a book from my local big-B store, I get it in two days, not the two weeks it often took at Baxter's, but that's hardly ever an issue, since unlike Baxter's my big-B store almost never doesn't have a book I'm looking for. So, you know, I feel badly for Mr. Baxter, who was a wonderful gentleman, but the truth is the stores that replaced his are simply better bookstores.

Of course, all that said, the increasing proliferation of non-fast-food restaurant chains, your Champ's and Bennigan's and Olive Gardens and whatnot, really does bother me. The food tends to be quite poor, and the prices too high for the quality, and unlike McD's these chains do drive good local alternatives out of business. So I'm deeply ambivalent, but my experience is such that I can't condemn every instance of homogenous chain proliferation. Sometimes, as with McDonald's and the big-box bookstores, it's can actually be a very good thing.

[pdcorlis]

I think this conversation is swinging wide a field. Its not really about the value of big box stores or market globalization - its about the proliferation of "tat." Its about stores filled with "jimmy caps" plush scotty dogs and poorly sewn kilts made of inferior material with embarrassingly sewn pleats. Its about a disregard and disrespect for the history and culture that is the royal mile and Scotland.

[arrScott]

I think this conversation is swinging wide a field. Its not really about the value of big box stores or market globalization - its about the proliferation of "tat." Its about stores filled with "jimmy caps" plush scotty dogs and poorly sewn kilts made of inferior material with embarrassingly sewn pleats. Its about a disregard and disrespect for the history and culture that is the royal mile and Scotland.

... And I couldn't agree more. I pretty much skip the Royal Mile these days when I'm in Edinburgh, except to visit specific established shops and to dine at a couple of long-established restaurants. It's a shame to see it become so cheap and kitschy. I seem to recall that in my first visits, before the turn of the century, the cheap kitschy shops were mainly just off the Royal Mile. Now, they seem to dominate the Mile itself, and the best shops are in New Town, down by the University and the museums, or on one's daytrip to Stirling.