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Miles

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Mrs. Carter and I have embarked on a cross country journey. Our last two trips west we followed Route 66 and the Oregon Trail. Both times we stopped along the way and made sure we found the little gems that make travel interesting. We saw the Cadillac Ranch, and we put our feet on the Field of Dreams. Along the way Mrs. Carter finds wonderful local sights and eateries. We try our hardest not to bounce from Starbucks to Starbucks and avoid all the things we can find at home. When we travel, our feeling is, why drive thousands of miles to get the same food and coffee we can get at home.

There was a time when I was younger, when my parents drove our family across America, that we stopped in places and all we could get was the local cuisine, unless you wanted an A&W burger or a McDonald’s. Everything was local or regional. Those days are gone. Mrs. Carter has to use all of her Google and internet search skills to find the remaining local attractions and food. But we have seen the largest buffalo statue, and we have had the best wings and the best chicken pot pie in the country, along with the wonder of seeing America at eye level, including moose, eagles, and some of the best views the world has to offer.

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Claude

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The shift you’re describing happened in a specific window. McDonald’s had fewer than 1,000 locations in 1968 and over 14,000 by 2000. The whole American roadside was rewritten between roughly 1970 and 2000. You watched the early part of it as a kid in the back of your parents’ car. Now you’re driving the same routes with the rewrite complete.

The reason Mrs. Carter has to search for the local gems is that “local gem” is itself a new category. Before this rewrite, there was no need for the phrase. You pulled into a town and ate where the town ate, because there wasn’t anything else. The phrase only exists because the default flipped.

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Miles

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We started this trip by driving north and stopping in a little place that had a peanut butter and jalapeño jelly bacon cheeseburger. The minute Mrs. Carter heard it from the waitress, she looked at me and knew that was what I was going to order. This is what we are looking for. No corporate suite could ever think this up. This was original. Thank you New York.

Let me explain. When you travel enough, you realize that every corporate suite goes to conferences at least twice a year, and they all swap ideas like kids used to swap baseball cards. Conferences are killing America’s uniqueness and anyone’s ability to come up with an original idea. And should someone come up with one, everyone else goes to a conference, hears about it, and faster than a rumor can travel across a small town, every other business in the industry will be deploying it in their boardrooms as if they are the originator of this new thing. Corporations don’t have to be original. They just have to be fast followers.

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Claude

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You’ve described something that researchers named in 1983. The pressure for organizations in the same industry to look alike is called isomorphism, and the conference circuit is one of its main delivery mechanisms. Same schools, same journals, same consultants, same hotel ballrooms three times a year. The playbooks get traded and brought home.

The math behind it is simple. A small cook risks bread and bacon if a weird burger flops. A corporate executive risks his career if a national menu change flops. So originality lives at the small scale where the downside is cheap, and conformity lives at the large scale where the downside is expensive. The fast follower model isn’t a failure of corporate America. It’s the strategy.

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Miles

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Local chefs and cooks and businesses get ideas from solving a problem or from experimentation on friends and staff. A local manufacturer solves problems sometimes that people don’t even see but feel. A local restaurant makes a burger and has a friend try it, and in the case of the peanut butter and jelly cheeseburger, I would bet some friend was also drinking at the time. Necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes drunken silliness is too, but it is there, and it is local until it proves out. Then corporate buys it and changes it.

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Claude

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That’s the pipeline in one sentence. Local until it proves out, then corporate buys it and changes it. The peanut butter jalapeño bacon cheeseburger is safe for now because it hasn’t proven out yet. Give it three years and a viral video and a regional chain will roll out a worse version with the jelly swapped for a sweet glaze because the jalapeño jelly tested poorly in suburban focus groups.

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Miles

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Now here is what we discovered in Canada. It has been overrun by the corporations. As we drive through small town after small town, the anchor restaurants are A&W or Tim Hortons, neither one we desire to eat at. It feels like in their haste to mimic the US, they abandoned the things that made them Canada. We drove into a small town to get gas, a town of 800, and the one coffee shop they had was a Starbucks.

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Claude

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Tim Hortons was a real Canadian institution for fifty years. In 2014 it was bought by the parent company of Burger King, a Brazilian-American private equity firm called 3G Capital, famous for ruthless cost cutting. Franchisees publicly revolted in 2017 and 2018 over ingredient changes and squeezed margins. The coffee got worse. The food got cheaper. The Canadian identity attached to the brand got hollowed out, but the locations stayed because the locations were the asset.

So when you drive into a Canadian town of 800 and the only options are Tim Hortons, A&W, and a Starbucks, you’re seeing a country that took a different path than America for thirty years and then took the American path anyway. The delay was real. The destination was the same.

The Starbucks in that town of 800 is doing something specific. In a small town economy, only a few employers can pay above minimum and offer predictable hours. The young people working at that Starbucks used to work at the local diner, the local bakery, the gas station deli that made its own sandwiches. The chain wins by pulling the labor out of the local places first. Then the local places can’t keep cooks, can’t keep hours, and close.

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Miles

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As I walk up to the counter of the Starbucks, I see the corporate bagel that no New Jersey or New York deli would even call a bagel, and I see the same chocolate croissant and food I can get at the local Starbucks I avoid near my house. The good news is, near my house, we have small coffee shops that let me avoid them. The options here are the Starbucks or the coffee at the gas station store, which is what we went with more than once.

And the search continued. We even tried to make an exception, saying we could go to chains we hadn’t seen before. So in we went to a Chuck’s Roadhouse, which is a version of Buffalo Wild Wings and Outback.

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Claude

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Chuck’s Roadhouse is a Canadian chain started in Ontario in 2014, built specifically to fill the slot Outback fills in the States. The Canadian innovation was figuring out how to apply the American casual dining template across Canada faster. The exception you made was reasonable and it was always going to fail. A chain you haven’t seen before is still a chain. New to your eyes, the same in its bones.

The gas station coffee choice is the real measure of how far this has gone. Gas station coffee used to be a punchline. In a lot of North American small towns now, it’s the most local option left, because it’s still made on-site and the person pouring it probably grew up within twenty miles. That’s a low floor. It’s the floor that remains.

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Sources & Notes

1. McDonald’s location data from company annual reports, 1968 and 2000.

2. DiMaggio, P. J. and Powell, W. W., “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review, 1983.

3. Restaurant Brands International acquisition of Tim Hortons, 2014. Public filings.

4. Coverage of Tim Hortons franchisee disputes, Great White North Franchisee Association lawsuits, 2017 and 2018.

5. Chuck’s Roadhouse Bar & Grill, founded 2014, Burlington, Ontario.