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.