A franchise-related hypothesis. I think I need Bruise's input on this. It has to do with probability. This is the hypothesis: For each casual dining restaurant X, there is a probability greater than 0.9 that another casual dining restaurant Y exists within a 1 mile radius. They are like deer. When you see one, you know another is around. I think the usefulness of this theory is dubious.

I am still thinking about the Franchise 500 . Not related to the Daytona 500. Unless you assign a franchise to each mile of the race. Which would be sort of cool. It is such a great data set. The question is what to do with it. What I'd like to do ideally is not feasible: that is, create a map of the United States based solely on franchise geographic exclusivities. As part of a franchise agreement, usually the franchisor promises that they will not put another franchise within a certain radius of your franchise. If you plotted all of these, you'd get a crazy looking map. Unfortunately, I think that this data is probably kept under lock and key by each of the 500 franchisors. Potentially you can make some assumptions that can get you started though. For example, that each franchisor grants a 5 mile exclusive radius to the franchisee.

Another idea I had was trying to graph the development of franchises geographically. Taking the Franchise 500 and finding out the year and city that the business first started in. Plot those on map and color code by year.

Any other ideas of how we can turn the Franchise 500 into something interesting?

T.G.I.F. really is a sad concept. There are four other days unaccounted for. 4/7 is more than 50%.

Unrelatedly, this is what Walter Benjamin had to say about Paul Klee's Angelus Novus: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/shadowtime/images/klee_engel_higher-res.jpg

"There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm."

Welcome, Decor, Bar Codes

I figure I should say some words of introductory or welcome to get the ball rolling. I think we've all seen enough blogs, however, that this should be self-explanatory. I am not going to go into detail about how this works (how to distinguish a "post" from a "comment" from a "hyperlink"). I think we are fortunate enough to share that common vocabulary.

In anticipation for the upcoming "Franchise 2007" issue, I have been thinking a lot about franchises. I think Bruise was the one who was interested in Applebees and in particular how they were able to stay focused on the neighborhood successfully.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/07/AR2005120702607.html

There are several key points. First and foremost, note on the second page, "So voracious is Friday's need for retro junk that Edwards had to devise a bar code inventory system to keep track of it all." Any ideas about the artistic implications of this? Can we map this -- in a Dewey Decimal sense (comments welcome on Dewey Decimal in general) with a geospatial axis? Other proposals?

I anticipate that Fridays and Michelle Edwards will not be that interested in providing us the raw data of their inventory (although who knows). We might have to break their code manually. Thus, your mission: next time you are at Fridays look for barcodes and take down the number. If everybody records even a few barcodes from Fridays across the country, we are bound to get enough of a data set to be able to make some conclusions. Then we would have enough clout to positively demand that they give the raw data for our artistic, non-competitive purposes.