Hi, friends!
The other day I stopped at a bakery for a loaf of fresh bread at what I thought was a local bakery. And then as I was checking out I was like hmmm this place looks a little too slick with the logos, etc.
Then I googled later and found out it’s a franchise of a chain. I’m more annoyed that I spent like $4 more on a loaf of bread than the decent loaves at the grocery store. I don’t have anything against chain bakeries, but if I want to get bread from one, there’s like 3 Paneras closer than that place. LOL
Do you have sneaky fake independent businesses near you? There’s some “local smoothie” places one of my cousins loves and they’re fucking herbalife shills.
Supposedly there are Ubereats and Doordash pizza places you can order from that are actually just chains like Papa Johns in disguise, but I haven’t encountered one yet. Maybe that’s because I just order from the local one I know and don’t go looking.
During the Corona shutdown, we had a bunch of new restaurants pop up online that were really just chains offering a different menu for delivery only using a catchy new name. I never had food delivered but read about them. I hate what AB did to the local breweries when they bought Red Hook, Elysian, 10 Barrel, & Kona. I stopped going to them at that point. Lagunitas got bought by Heineken & people here wouldn’t go to their taproom. They now take over all the beer space at our grocery stores & try to sell it as craft beer. It is not. They just sold off a bunch of the above brands to a big marijuana company after running some good brands into the ground. Craft brew people are usually pretty well informed & don’t support corporate beer.
Molsons and Labtts ruined two good breweries whose products I liked. Sleeman and Upper Canada.
They bought Granville Island Brewing which was tiny when I last went but cool.
The farmer’s market in my hometown got busted about ten years ago for having the produce shipped in from a conglomerate in Toronto.
After a bunch of infighting, city-council beefs with the farmers (pun not intended), everyone agreed that they’d be able to keep doing the same shit whilst a new & actual local farmer’s market opened that’d be actually funded and the previous grifters would not.
Then the city had a mayoral election and council bounced to the right so the new actual local market was de-funded…so they did what needed be done by grass roots…which led to the conglomerate grifters doing a whole lot of off-fucking but the local only’s had to pay vastly more for the space until there was another election and a young 32 year old girl won and ever since…
it’s been local only…and there are so many successful local farmers as a result that there are farmer’s markets in BOTH locations…
both funded by conucil.
That’s awesome!
Are there several local markets the same farms can use? Like I’ll see the same local farms post on the facebooks about 2 or 3 different markets each week they’ll be at.
Our local farmers market clearly waives the rules about where produce comes from by, I don’t know, December? January? You’ll see citrus fruit being sold in the middle of flurries in February, but eventually it flips to local-only rules again in the spring.
I think part of the reason is to provide a source of produce year-round to the neighborhood, although there’s a decent chain grocery store and a Pakastani grocery just a couple of blocks away, so it’s not like it’s a food desert. Mainly I think whoever runs it wants to keep vendors happy and nobody really cares if they sell a few crates of wholesale tomatoes from Florida in November.
Yeah the grandaddy farmers market here downtown, Soulard Market, is the oldest farmers market west* of the Mississippi.
While there are a few local farmers and ranchers, the vast majority of the sellers are just going to Produce Row and buying from the same distributers that supply stores and restaurants.
That being said, you see a lot of the same brands as the grocery stores and typically it’s cheaper since overhead is lower.
*I crack up everytime something in or near St Louis is like “oldest west of the Mississippi” motherfuckers you’re on the damn river, if someone farther west in the Midwest region got it first it would be embarrassing.
When I used to live in TN there were a ton of restaurants that everyone thought were local places because there weren’t other locations. Turns out most of them were chains that only had one location per major market. I didn’t know about half of them until we moved and saw them all over again.
I remember being introduced to Starbucks decades ago in another city, before they exploded, and I was told they were a chain. I thought they were a chain of like three shops in that city and five in Seattle and maybe a dozen or so in total. Oh how wrong I was, even then.
Especially before we were always on our phones or using the internet, it’s not like you’d really think “oh wow that must be a chain.”
Olive Garden, sure. You see commercials for them.
But Bonefish Grill? Fuzzy’s Taco Shop? I didn’t realize those are chains until I googled a list of chain restaurants in the US.