28 ms·

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, t

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.
- nrp 8y ago
  Sweet tea is an interesting example actually, in that McDonalds made it available nationally 10 years ago. There is a certain amount of culinary darwinism at play here, where the strongest regional foods have gone national over the last couple of decades. See also, Chipotle scaling the Mission burrito to thousands of stores.
reaperducer 8y ago
This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification I don't know if gentrification is the right word. Maybe death by standardization. The big breakthrough that made McDonald's a successful company was coming up with processes and supply chains that allowed its food to be predictable. Before McDonald's, when you drove across the country and stopped at a burger joint, you never knew what the food would be like. Today, if you see the golden arches, you know exactly that the food will look like, taste like, and for the most part, cost. This is also true on an international level. Even though there are regional items on McDonald's menus, when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia. There's a name for it in diplomatic circles, but the term escapes me. Essentially, opening McDonald's restaurants in a new country introduces that country to supply chains, language, tastes, and other Western elements that help bridge the cultural gap between nations and brings a level of understanding to the masses that eventually leads to closer relations. It's the reason that when McDonald's first went into Europe, it used the slogan "The taste of America." With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war. A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.
- fernandopj 8y ago
  > With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war. > A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment. That's the first time I hear that correlation, and it's amazing. I could see that opening a McDonald's in NK would be symbolic, but not at that one-layer-deeper level. It's the kind of freakonomics insight I'll be able to drop at conversations for a long time!
- cpursley 8y ago
  > when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia. I'm an American currently living in Russia. McDonald's menu here is different. In fact, it's better and the ingredients are higher quality (which is quite ironic). Same for all American fast-food chains in Russia (and Europe, for that matter).
Kalium 8y ago
You're right! That sounds like an amazing experience, going to a different part of your country and finding a deeply different culture. Where accent and vocabulary and daily life are all different. Where there's a sense of place, and a distinct local identity and history. It's perhaps possible that you and I are so wonderfully blessed as to already live in such a place! I've had the experience of struggling to understand the local dialect. To work to absorb the local diction and vocabulary, to come to grips with local history and understand the local identity. It's easy to see a Taco Bell, a Starbucks, and a cookie-cutter diner and decide every place is the same. To be sure, those very much are. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this is just a patina. What you and I and others seek and love is there, today, still. It lives and breathes and thrives. It just requires a token effort to look for.
rayiner 8y ago
> 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. It may be more interesting to visit such an America, but it would be a lot harder to democratically govern such an America.
- singingfish 8y ago
  I dunno, I kind of get the feeling indonesian democracy is in a healthier state than american democracy.
  - darcys22 8y ago
    Based on what?
    - singingfish 8y ago
      Based on what I know about Indonesian politics and American politics. I grew up in Indonesia for a while during the Soeharto regime, and have maintained an interest since.
  - HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
    Do you know anything at all about indonesian politics?
  - vpribish 8y ago
    then your feelings are mis-calibrated. They only have had free elections for 20 years! Aceh is practically a theocracy. Political violence is common. They just jailed under blasphemy laws the loser of of the governor's election in Jakarta. but don't take my word for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index US - at an embarrassing, miserable 21st place scoring 7.98. Indonesia - 68th.
    - singingfish 8y ago
      I bet it would be a different story if you took the direction of movement of the score. Honestly I was thinking about the presidential politics rather than regional. Indonesia is a large and diverse country. Similar population to the USA and arguably more diverse.
luord 8y ago
> This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. As someone hailing from an apparently more "heterogeneous" country than the USA, I gotta ask: Death of what?
- astrodust 8y ago
  Death of culture. Death of variety. Death of everything that made America an interesting place to visit. Every city used to have its own local shops, brands, traditions, cultural events. Cleveland and Rochester were worlds apart despite being geographically close. Now it's the same stores, the same malls, the same cookie-cutter McMansions. The only variety left is the color of the police cars and minor variations in the speed limit.
vintagedave 8y ago
> 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. Try visiting an English-speaking country that's not America. I suggest that because the inverse was true for me: In 2010, I (Australian) ended up in a hotel somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi on my way to Pascagoula to go sailing for work. First time in America. In the morning, I wanted breakfast, and saw a Waffle House at a truck stop over the highway from the hotel. I knew them from films but I'd never been to one. I wandered in, and tried to order. The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi. You might be able to get the same experience in a small town out back somewhere in Australia. Who knows. Try it :)
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  > The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi. As an American in Australia I found that I could communicate easily enough, but it was often a struggle with cashiers. Katoomba was the smallest town I visited, and that didn't pose much of a challenge (except for the food). Contrast that experience with London's east end where there were a number of accents I simply couldn't understand. The thing I've found with Australia, Canada, and the UK is that in major cities the dialect is similar enough that if you're somewhat familiar with British vocabulary you'll be fine. Contrast that to someplace like Indonesia / Malaysia / Singapore where the accent isn't impenetrable but the slang is mostly Malay derived and it's a whole other world. Bringing it back to Waffle House though, the only WHs I've visited were in areas where the southern accent wasn't particularly strong. We have local and big chain diners out here on the west coast (e.g. Denny's, IHOP), so a diner isn't a new experience. But visiting Waffle House was a bit of a culture shock to me. While I could understand the words, every single person was discussing football. Except for some expat restaurants, you really wouldn't find that style of situation.
jsonne 8y ago
I want to challenge you on a few fronts. 1. Different parts of the US have vastly different values and cultural differences. Unless of course you want to compare SF, to rural Utah filled with devout Mormons, to the south side of Chicago, to Miami and say they're all the same. 2. The argument you're making is essentially against cosmopolitanism. I don't per say disagree, but it should be known that while you listed off the "fun" parts of a huge diversity of culture in one country you also run into the less fun when it comes to shared values on things like equality of the sexes, permissiveness of different sexual orientations and religions etc. Those very much so are also a huge part of cultural diversity.
- astrodust 8y ago
  There are pockets where there's cultural differences, but you really need to dig to hit the bedrock. Superficially there's almost no difference. The things that once made places like San Francisco unique and interesting are being destroyed by gentrification, and Utah itself is being gentrified just the same. I'm not arguing against cosmopolitanism, but that's not what you think it is. That's where wildly different cultures can co-exist, side by side, and you can move seamlessly from one to another. Manhattan used to be a good example of this, but now it's getting extremely bland, with all the character being paved over by crushingly dull uniformity. A lot of Americans think accepting diversity means allowing non-white people to act as if they were white, and this is where all this gentrification comes from. Yes, our condo is progressive because we don't discriminate. Anyone who can afford the cripplingly high costs are welcome to live there!

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.
nrp 8y ago
Sweet tea is an interesting example actually, in that McDonalds made it available nationally 10 years ago. There is a certain amount of culinary darwinism at play here, where the strongest regional foods have gone national over the last couple of decades. See also, Chipotle scaling the Mission burrito to thousands of stores.

reaperducer 8y ago

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification I don't know if gentrification is the right word. Maybe death by standardization. The big breakthrough that made McDonald's a successful company was coming up with processes and supply chains that allowed its food to be predictable. Before McDonald's, when you drove across the country and stopped at a burger joint, you never knew what the food would be like. Today, if you see the golden arches, you know exactly that the food will look like, taste like, and for the most part, cost. This is also true on an international level. Even though there are regional items on McDonald's menus, when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia. There's a name for it in diplomatic circles, but the term escapes me. Essentially, opening McDonald's restaurants in a new country introduces that country to supply chains, language, tastes, and other Western elements that help bridge the cultural gap between nations and brings a level of understanding to the masses that eventually leads to closer relations. It's the reason that when McDonald's first went into Europe, it used the slogan "The taste of America." With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war. A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment.

fernandopj 8y ago
> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war. > A lot of people with no understanding of history laughed when it was brought up that opening a McDonald's in North Korea was an important part of the Trump-Kim summit. But diplomats saw it as a watershed moment. That's the first time I hear that correlation, and it's amazing. I could see that opening a McDonald's in NK would be symbolic, but not at that one-layer-deeper level. It's the kind of freakonomics insight I'll be able to drop at conversations for a long time!
cpursley 8y ago
> when I buy fries in St. Petersburg, Florida, they taste exactly the same as the ones I get in St. Petersburg, Russia. I'm an American currently living in Russia. McDonald's menu here is different. In fact, it's better and the ingredients are higher quality (which is quite ironic). Same for all American fast-food chains in Russia (and Europe, for that matter).

Kalium 8y ago

You're right! That sounds like an amazing experience, going to a different part of your country and finding a deeply different culture. Where accent and vocabulary and daily life are all different. Where there's a sense of place, and a distinct local identity and history. It's perhaps possible that you and I are so wonderfully blessed as to already live in such a place! I've had the experience of struggling to understand the local dialect. To work to absorb the local diction and vocabulary, to come to grips with local history and understand the local identity. It's easy to see a Taco Bell, a Starbucks, and a cookie-cutter diner and decide every place is the same. To be sure, those very much are. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this is just a patina. What you and I and others seek and love is there, today, still. It lives and breathes and thrives. It just requires a token effort to look for.

rayiner 8y ago

> 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. It may be more interesting to visit such an America, but it would be a lot harder to democratically govern such an America.

singingfish 8y ago
I dunno, I kind of get the feeling indonesian democracy is in a healthier state than american democracy.
- darcys22 8y ago
  Based on what?
  - singingfish 8y ago
    Based on what I know about Indonesian politics and American politics. I grew up in Indonesia for a while during the Soeharto regime, and have maintained an interest since.
- HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  Do you know anything at all about indonesian politics?
- vpribish 8y ago
  then your feelings are mis-calibrated. They only have had free elections for 20 years! Aceh is practically a theocracy. Political violence is common. They just jailed under blasphemy laws the loser of of the governor's election in Jakarta. but don't take my word for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index US - at an embarrassing, miserable 21st place scoring 7.98. Indonesia - 68th.
  - singingfish 8y ago
    I bet it would be a different story if you took the direction of movement of the score. Honestly I was thinking about the presidential politics rather than regional. Indonesia is a large and diverse country. Similar population to the USA and arguably more diverse.

luord 8y ago

> This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. As someone hailing from an apparently more "heterogeneous" country than the USA, I gotta ask: Death of what?

astrodust 8y ago
Death of culture. Death of variety. Death of everything that made America an interesting place to visit. Every city used to have its own local shops, brands, traditions, cultural events. Cleveland and Rochester were worlds apart despite being geographically close. Now it's the same stores, the same malls, the same cookie-cutter McMansions. The only variety left is the color of the police cars and minor variations in the speed limit.

vintagedave 8y ago

> 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. Try visiting an English-speaking country that's not America. I suggest that because the inverse was true for me: In 2010, I (Australian) ended up in a hotel somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi on my way to Pascagoula to go sailing for work. First time in America. In the morning, I wanted breakfast, and saw a Waffle House at a truck stop over the highway from the hotel. I knew them from films but I'd never been to one. I wandered in, and tried to order. The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi. You might be able to get the same experience in a small town out back somewhere in Australia. Who knows. Try it :)

inferiorhuman 8y ago
> The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi. As an American in Australia I found that I could communicate easily enough, but it was often a struggle with cashiers. Katoomba was the smallest town I visited, and that didn't pose much of a challenge (except for the food). Contrast that experience with London's east end where there were a number of accents I simply couldn't understand. The thing I've found with Australia, Canada, and the UK is that in major cities the dialect is similar enough that if you're somewhat familiar with British vocabulary you'll be fine. Contrast that to someplace like Indonesia / Malaysia / Singapore where the accent isn't impenetrable but the slang is mostly Malay derived and it's a whole other world. Bringing it back to Waffle House though, the only WHs I've visited were in areas where the southern accent wasn't particularly strong. We have local and big chain diners out here on the west coast (e.g. Denny's, IHOP), so a diner isn't a new experience. But visiting Waffle House was a bit of a culture shock to me. While I could understand the words, every single person was discussing football. Except for some expat restaurants, you really wouldn't find that style of situation.

jsonne 8y ago

I want to challenge you on a few fronts. 1. Different parts of the US have vastly different values and cultural differences. Unless of course you want to compare SF, to rural Utah filled with devout Mormons, to the south side of Chicago, to Miami and say they're all the same. 2. The argument you're making is essentially against cosmopolitanism. I don't per say disagree, but it should be known that while you listed off the "fun" parts of a huge diversity of culture in one country you also run into the less fun when it comes to shared values on things like equality of the sexes, permissiveness of different sexual orientations and religions etc. Those very much so are also a huge part of cultural diversity.

astrodust 8y ago
There are pockets where there's cultural differences, but you really need to dig to hit the bedrock. Superficially there's almost no difference. The things that once made places like San Francisco unique and interesting are being destroyed by gentrification, and Utah itself is being gentrified just the same. I'm not arguing against cosmopolitanism, but that's not what you think it is. That's where wildly different cultures can co-exist, side by side, and you can move seamlessly from one to another. Manhattan used to be a good example of this, but now it's getting extremely bland, with all the character being paved over by crushingly dull uniformity. A lot of Americans think accepting diversity means allowing non-white people to act as if they were white, and this is where all this gentrification comes from. Yes, our condo is progressive because we don't discriminate. Anyone who can afford the cripplingly high costs are welcome to live there!