Friday, September 12, 2003

Brand away

Mike, by the way, offers near-exclusive coverage of a nearly-invisible planetary sciences conference (talk about branding...).

:-)

It's that day. Uplift is its new blog.

Out of Cash

Johnny Cash has died. Many posts about it over at Blogcritics (which only gets better every day, by the way).

John Ritter also joins his dad, Tex.

You want some flies with that?

I come to Seattle every few months. Usually I stay downtown and commute up to Ballard in a rental car. I take Elliot, which turns into 15th, cross the bridge and take a left on Leary into downtown Ballard, where Linux Journal lives.

Along the way, on 15th, there used to be a Burger King on the right. If I didn't have time for a sit-down breakfast, I'd grab some kind of sausage & egg busquit or bagel thing, and head along on my way.

Well, that BK, I discovered, is dead. Boarded up. There isn't another fast food place before the bridge, so this morning I headed up 15th to Market, and went to the BK just east of there, on the North side.

As I went through the drive-in, I noticed that several of their translucent meal menu signs were turned around backwards. Two were for busquit items. So I asked what was up with that.

"We're out of busquits." the squawkbox said.

"Will you have them tomorrow?"

"We've discontinued them."

"Why?"

"Actually, we're closing down tomorrow. This is our last day here."

"Are you moving?"

"No, we're just closing the place down."

"What's replacing it?"

"I don't know. Something that begins with an 'A,' I think."

Seemed weird. Made me wonder if these were signs of death for BurgerKing itself.

So I just looked up the story, and found this from a few days ago. It begins,

Local franchisees are reopening and upgrading local Burger King restaurants following the closure of a number of the fast-food establishments during the past year.

Seems a new owner is taking over for an old one.

I can see why old owners don't put up sings saying new owners will do a better job. Meanwhile, lots of people will be passing two Burger King corpses on the way to work.