Imagine

Entry posted by Flack March 30, 2007

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Imagine, if you will, the following exchange in a high-level KFC board room meeting.

"Sales are down -- there's no denying that fact. Some of you have speculated that our drop in profits has come from an increase in our customers' nutritional education. Less people are eating fried foods in general. Others of you suspect that the decrease has come from media reports about complaints from PETA, in how poorly we treat our chickens (before we kill them and cook them). But that is not the case. I am here to tell you today that our sales problem stems from the fact that we are ten feet too close to the road."

At this point the overpaid tie-wearing board member, struggling to justify his job, displays a variety of PowerPoint slides (or maybe printed signs mounted on posterboard) showing how sales will increase if they were to move the building back 10'. The presentation consists of a dozen or so overhead views of the building with various arrows pointing in various directions. The presenter somehow convinces the group that not only is the building's location the source of their woes, but that moving the building is impossible, so the (currently functional) building needs to be torn down and rebuild 10' further away from the road.

I don't know if that's how it really happened or not, but a year or two ago our local KFC restaurant, which was open and functioning as a restaurant, was torn down and rebuilt 10' away from where it originally stood. Not to be outdone, shortly afterwards Long John Silver's tore THEIR restaurant down, replacing it with a Long John Silver's/A&W Hotdog restaurant. Because, you know, it takes a lot of internal modifications to a restaurant to facilitate hotdog assembly. A couple of month's ago, the McDonalds in Mustang was torn down. They're building a new one right on top of the old one (I'm not even sure they're moving it ten feet).

I'm reminded of this each time I walk into work. There, next to our building, is what's left of our old cafeteria. When the cafeteria was open, I used to eat there at least once a day, sometimes twice. Several years ago the cafeteria was closed. A few months ago, construction crews moved in to demolish the old cafeteria, and when that's finished, they're going to build (you guessed it) a new cafeteria on top of where the old cafeteria used to be.

I think maybe this is where the old, "let's don't and say we did," saying came from.

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supercat 125

Posted March 31, 2007

I suspect that in some cases building codes and such may play a role. Government decides that certain clearances need to be increased, and the only practical way to manage that is to rip out the old and install the new.

Another thing to consider is that a lot of buildings are constructed cheaply, since it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of money in something that may have to be torn town; consequently, there may be a limited usable lifespan even in cases where the useful lifespan would be longer.