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There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or fiv

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in Richfield, Utah or Ermine, Kentucky and you find the same Lay's chips, the same Progresso or Campbell's soup, the same Colgate and Oral-B toothbrush, the same flatscreen TVs, the same video games. You pay with the same cash or card, you have the same return policy. When talking to people, you can talk about the same high-profile domestic sports teams, invoke recent pop culture events, or federal politics, and they'll have something to say. There's swaths of the US that are far off the beaten path, but an overwhelming portion of the population is hooked into the same fabric of distribution of information and products. This is made easier, and is also perceived more readily, by a shared home language being the language of interchange.

lisper 8y ago
> the same Lay's chips It is far from clear to me whether this is a feature or a bug.
- lmkg 8y ago
  It's a baseline. It's common that many places will have local offerings that exceed the baseline (moreso in other categories like beer than potato chips), but it's nice to know that literally the worst possible thing that could happen is they only have Lay's.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    Americans used to ridicule people living in the Soviet Union because they had to buy the same sofa, the same car, the same beer, all manufactured by the state. They lived in the same apartments, stamped out by decree, from Europe to the Pacific. Now having Lay's everywhere is a thing to be celebrated? Lay's are terrible. It's like what happens to a potato when you take all the fun out of them and make them into something even blander.
    - hikarudo 8y ago
      I think they meant that you can find Lay's everywhere, not that you can only find Lay's everywhere. There's a huge difference between those two things. I'd take that any day over Soviet Union.
      - astrodust 8y ago
        It's this kind of bland ubiquity that is what the Soviet Union was all about. I'm not saying the Soviet experience was great, but that the modern American experience of the same shit, the same stores, the same everything everywhere you go is bordering on absurd. America is a handful of mergers away from having one cable company, one telephone company, one media company, one film production company. That's not a good look.
enriquto 8y ago
Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  I don’t find that scary at all - because in the gaps there’s a whole load of diversity.
- always_good 8y ago
  The uniform experience of the US is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest "why would I travel elsewhere if I haven't even explored my own country?" As if seeing some new sights is the only rewarding aspect of being somewhere new rather than experiencing something truly different in life, like different culture, language, and way of life.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Although an awful lot of this difference is due to poverty and shouldn't be romanticized. I was recently in Cambodia and the new thing there is that they've recently gotten smartphones. Yes, some of the people I was with bemoaned this fact as it meant that things were becoming "less authentic", but the thing is, due to the lack of computers, the smartphone revolution is also the Internet revolution there. It is an wonderful thing from the Cambodian perspective.
- pixl97 8y ago
  There is no senseless uniformity. It really makes complete sense when you look at it from a logistics prospective. Why have 5 regional factories making things slightly different when you can make one large factory and exploit the efficiencies of scale and the countries transportation networks. The US has been pretty easy to cross since WWII. It is very easy for goods to travel through states. Europe, as a whole has not, though the formation of the EU has helped.
astrodust 8y ago
This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different. Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that have resisted this overwhelming pressure to conform, they're all the same. I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in. Where there's a sense of being somewhere and having history worth sharing.
- derekp7 8y ago
  There is still a lot of that out there (getting smaller though). For example if you aren't in the American South, don't expect to be able to order sweet tea in a restaurant -- instead, you will get iced tea and some packets of sugar (which isn't the same as putting sugar in when the tea is being made). Only recently have I seen sweet tea offered in some places. I grew up in the midwest, however my mom is from the deep south. So I didn't realize that most people around here have never had (or heard of) a banana sandwich (made with banana, mayo, and white bread). And until recently, you couldn't get things like headache powder (Goody's, Stanback, BC). That was strictly a Southern thing.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    The key is to ignore all of the giant signs and flashy advertising and look for the local brands. They're everywhere, even in Wal-Mart. Just look at the lower shelves. Of course, this doesn't always work when you're in a place like Minneapolis, or Chicago, or Dallas, where the national brands are the local brands.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      The problem is that when Wal-Mart shows up all the local businesses die but for the ones that sell stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't. That's usually just porn and adult toys with the occasional guns and/or liquor store.
vram22 8y ago
An interesting thing is that despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US, along many dimensions, based on what I've read in Wikipedia, for example, about regional US cuisines. The US might be a melting pot, but many of the ingredients in the pot are not quite melted - to coin a phrase :) - and I hope they stay that way.
- derekp7 8y ago
  More like a tossed salad!
  - vram22 8y ago
    Ha, great analogy :)
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  I think many tend to exaggerate the level of regional differences in America. Sure, there are some significant differences, but it's nowhere close to the level of difference of going to another country (except Canada). For example, language wise, if someone was raised in the US, I probably can't tell at all where they're from, especially if they're younger and/or college educated. Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average. I've lived in several regions in the US and never really got a feeling of being out of place or alien that I get sometimes visiting other countries.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average. Then you haven't talked to many real locals when you travel. When I talk to my relatives in New York City (real native New Yorkers, not imported midwest poser hipsters), my wife from another part of the country can't understand a word we say. Siri is tuned to some California nuanced accent that means she can't understand my wife at all. I don't know how it understand people from Boston. (Again, real local people from Boston, not the imported flatlanders.) A friend of mine from a major east coast city went through years of training to get rid of his accent. He says it was the key to becoming a success in the radio industry.
forapurpose 8y ago
> religion There's not a lot of shared religion in the US, other than growing secularism. Agnosticism, last I saw, was the fastest growing belief. When Americans were more religious, there was a lot of conflict over that.

lisper 8y ago

> the same Lay's chips It is far from clear to me whether this is a feature or a bug.

lmkg 8y ago
It's a baseline. It's common that many places will have local offerings that exceed the baseline (moreso in other categories like beer than potato chips), but it's nice to know that literally the worst possible thing that could happen is they only have Lay's.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Americans used to ridicule people living in the Soviet Union because they had to buy the same sofa, the same car, the same beer, all manufactured by the state. They lived in the same apartments, stamped out by decree, from Europe to the Pacific. Now having Lay's everywhere is a thing to be celebrated? Lay's are terrible. It's like what happens to a potato when you take all the fun out of them and make them into something even blander.
  - hikarudo 8y ago
    I think they meant that you can find Lay's everywhere, not that you can only find Lay's everywhere. There's a huge difference between those two things. I'd take that any day over Soviet Union.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It's this kind of bland ubiquity that is what the Soviet Union was all about. I'm not saying the Soviet experience was great, but that the modern American experience of the same shit, the same stores, the same everything everywhere you go is bordering on absurd. America is a handful of mergers away from having one cable company, one telephone company, one media company, one film production company. That's not a good look.

enriquto 8y ago

Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.

matthewmacleod 8y ago
I don’t find that scary at all - because in the gaps there’s a whole load of diversity.
always_good 8y ago
The uniform experience of the US is why I roll my eyes at people who suggest "why would I travel elsewhere if I haven't even explored my own country?" As if seeing some new sights is the only rewarding aspect of being somewhere new rather than experiencing something truly different in life, like different culture, language, and way of life.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Although an awful lot of this difference is due to poverty and shouldn't be romanticized. I was recently in Cambodia and the new thing there is that they've recently gotten smartphones. Yes, some of the people I was with bemoaned this fact as it meant that things were becoming "less authentic", but the thing is, due to the lack of computers, the smartphone revolution is also the Internet revolution there. It is an wonderful thing from the Cambodian perspective.
pixl97 8y ago
There is no senseless uniformity. It really makes complete sense when you look at it from a logistics prospective. Why have 5 regional factories making things slightly different when you can make one large factory and exploit the efficiencies of scale and the countries transportation networks. The US has been pretty easy to cross since WWII. It is very easy for goods to travel through states. Europe, as a whole has not, though the formation of the EU has helped.

astrodust 8y ago

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different. Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that have resisted this overwhelming pressure to conform, they're all the same. I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in. Where there's a sense of being somewhere and having history worth sharing.

derekp7 8y ago
There is still a lot of that out there (getting smaller though). For example if you aren't in the American South, don't expect to be able to order sweet tea in a restaurant -- instead, you will get iced tea and some packets of sugar (which isn't the same as putting sugar in when the tea is being made). Only recently have I seen sweet tea offered in some places. I grew up in the midwest, however my mom is from the deep south. So I didn't realize that most people around here have never had (or heard of) a banana sandwich (made with banana, mayo, and white bread). And until recently, you couldn't get things like headache powder (Goody's, Stanback, BC). That was strictly a Southern thing.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  The key is to ignore all of the giant signs and flashy advertising and look for the local brands. They're everywhere, even in Wal-Mart. Just look at the lower shelves. Of course, this doesn't always work when you're in a place like Minneapolis, or Chicago, or Dallas, where the national brands are the local brands.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    The problem is that when Wal-Mart shows up all the local businesses die but for the ones that sell stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't. That's usually just porn and adult toys with the occasional guns and/or liquor store.

vram22 8y ago

An interesting thing is that despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US, along many dimensions, based on what I've read in Wikipedia, for example, about regional US cuisines. The US might be a melting pot, but many of the ingredients in the pot are not quite melted - to coin a phrase :) - and I hope they stay that way.

derekp7 8y ago
More like a tossed salad!
- vram22 8y ago
  Ha, great analogy :)
TulliusCicero 8y ago
I think many tend to exaggerate the level of regional differences in America. Sure, there are some significant differences, but it's nowhere close to the level of difference of going to another country (except Canada). For example, language wise, if someone was raised in the US, I probably can't tell at all where they're from, especially if they're younger and/or college educated. Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average. I've lived in several regions in the US and never really got a feeling of being out of place or alien that I get sometimes visiting other countries.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Regional accents are weak as hell in the states, on average. Then you haven't talked to many real locals when you travel. When I talk to my relatives in New York City (real native New Yorkers, not imported midwest poser hipsters), my wife from another part of the country can't understand a word we say. Siri is tuned to some California nuanced accent that means she can't understand my wife at all. I don't know how it understand people from Boston. (Again, real local people from Boston, not the imported flatlanders.) A friend of mine from a major east coast city went through years of training to get rid of his accent. He says it was the key to becoming a success in the radio industry.

forapurpose 8y ago

> religion There's not a lot of shared religion in the US, other than growing secularism. Agnosticism, last I saw, was the fastest growing belief. When Americans were more religious, there was a lot of conflict over that.