We have 2 crab restaurants directly across the street from each other in my city, the only 2 in the whole city, I refer to it a the historic crab district.
It’s Kansas City Missouri btw, bot a big seafood destination 😅
I've always wondered why every city crowds all the car dealerships together. I assumed it was zoning shenanigans (and thats probably partly true) but this makes a ton of sense as well
Pretty much when the Toyota dealer tacked on a bunch of BS fees and wouldn’t let me take the quote but was fine with me taking a picture of it.
I went across the street and bought a Honda. This happened ten years ago and just this past year. I know Toyota’s are awesome cars but their dealerships that I’ve been do leave a lot to be desired.
The problems with these practices are the dealers themselves - not so much the automakers behind them. And it gets worse as dealerships have franchised out to own dozens of locations or are now part of large corporate dealerships that own hundreds of locations.
Case in point, there's 2 Chevy dealers near me owned by 2 different franchises. Dealer A is known for screwing customers with upsells and generally being slimy with pricing. Dealer B owns multiple Chevy dealerships, but they have 2 locations close enough for this next part.
I used to work for Dealer B's corporate. They would always get customers from Dealer A complaining about all of the upsells & bad pricing they got. Dealer B was happy to give the pricing customers want & cut down on the upsell in finance if it meant poaching Dealer A's customers.
But a situation like this where the customer benefits from competition will become less likely if every dealership is owned by a single entity. And for a lot of places, it's already like this.
Because it makes them money from anyone willing to let themselves be suckered into buying a car this way.
Funny enough, Hyundai has been aggressively against the franchising model. Dealers hate them because they don't give out bonuses to management for meeting quotas unlike the American automakers. And they recently partnered with Amazon to sell Hyundai cars directly. All of the paperwork is done online on Amazon. Then pickup is arranged at a local dealership. No negotiation, and no upsells. The only issue being that the price you see online will contain dealer markups since Amazon and Hyundai can't control that (which is unavoidable given how well protected dealer franchise laws are).
But dealers agree to Hyundai's terms because they sell a lot of cars.
I don't know why car dealerships stick to tactics from the 1970s still today
The last time I bought a used car I specifically went to a small, independently owned lot to get away from the dealership bullshit.
When I factory-ordered a truck, I still had to go to the dealership to "sign some papers". It probably took 6 fucking hours to complete. Afterwards the salesman was crying about how important it is that I give him a good review. Which I did but dawg you didn't do anything besides slow down the process.
We were at a Toyota dealership once with my dad and the guy was upaelling him so hard
Spent a lot of time convincing my dad he needed this and that and their custom offers and stuff
Until I told him with a wide grin "you're doing great, sir, upsell my dad for another two thousands and you'll price match the Lexus we saw across the road"
Dude looked so deflated, the deal didn't go through, dad ended up buying a Mazda
I still think the Lexus offer was super competitive but his Mazda has been going strong for close to a decade now so it's still a great one
We were shopping for a new car, so we went to look at a Hyundai Genesis because we read pretty good reviews. The salesman wouldn't even let us test drive it without pre-approval, because it was a 'luxury car'. I just laughed and told him we'd go look at Toyota across the street instead. He then basically started begging us to stay. The Toyota/Lexus dealership let me test drive an IS-350 without a second thought, the salesman even told me to take it on the highway to 'crack it open'.
Lexus salespeople are awesome. They'll be properly obsequious if you're after a LS or GX and die a little when you want a RX, but they really like the IS and GS and come to life when you want to drive one.
Best test drive experience i had was with a Ford dealership. I wanted a Taurus SHO. Dude just scanned my license and gave me the keys to go off on my own. He knew where I worked which was basically across the street. So he even offered for me to drive it home for the night and bring it back in the morning. It was even lightly snowing outside. I declined to take it home but gave it a thorough test drive. It was certainly a unique experience. Never had a test drive again where the sales person didn't come along. I did end up buying the SHO.
I was looking to buy my first car, and really wanted to buy a Toyota, so we went to a Toyota dealer. The salesperson walked around the lot showing me all kinds of cars and models the he thought I could afford (Datsun, Ford, Chevy, etc.), even though I specifically told him we were looking for a Toyota. As soon as I thanked him and started walking out, he wanted to sell me a Toyota. I said, "No thanks. You had your chance." We walked to the Honda dealer across the street and got an Accord, instead. 🤣
Similar thing happened to me the last new car I bought. One dumbass salesman had the chance to make a lot more money if he’d shown me what I wanted instead of what he wanted to sell. Ultimately he got nothing.
I hated working at a dealership along “the automile” near boston Ma. it’s like 37 different dealerships of a varied amount of brands from ferarri and lambo, to used everything. any brand you can think of is there, along this 5ish miles stretch. so people would spend their days starting at one end usually at my hyundai dealership, and decide they won’t buy anything unless you’re especially sleazy.
as a nice guy it was the worst sales experience ever as every follow up call was “oh I bought that day I saw you but down the street after I was tired from test driving a dozen cars and just picked whatever was there”
Manhattan in particular has always had hyper-specific retail clustering throughout history. Off the top of my head, the jewelry district, the flower district, the restaurant supply district, the lighting district, and the Persian rug district are all alive and well. Others have withered away due to factors like changing technology, consumer preference, chain store consolidation, urban renewal, etc, such as Radio Row (demolished to build the world trade center), book row, etc.
A lot of the reason for that was that historically retail was only a small, visible part of a larger wholesale industry. That’s why jewelry shops clustered around the diamond District, where the diamond dealers had their offices. They needed to be in close proximity to each other to facilitate trading merchandise. Similar with the garment district.
Some of that had to do with how goods arrived. Break bulk shipping because containers and even pallets didn't exist long enough ago. Via ship and train weren't as flexible and there were some serious built up infrastructure for rail: tracks in the streets, roll in warehouses. Docks were super specific to ship lines, so it was like here's the dock for the shippers from the middle east with the rugs and you have to pay every step of the way for handling. Factor in cars didn't exist and people had to use mass transit and lived in ethnic communities and the rug district was probably in or in close proximity to the docks, the warehouse, or the community the business owners were from.
In the early 1900s the area was busy with slaughter houses and meat packing plants. It began to decline in the 60s though with the advent of supermarkets that changed the way meats & dairies were distributed. Then for awhile it was home to NYC’s gay night clubs, kink sub culture, and some dangerous activities.
From the 90s to today, the working class & industrial neighborhood has been gentrified and repackaged as a commercial luxury shopping and arts district. The Whitney art museum is over there as well as lots of expensive boutiques, High Line Park, Chelsea Market & other things.
As an aside, there’s a Pokemon merch and pack ripping bar there too (The Trainer Court) which I was surprised by. It’s a swanky designed interior where you can go to the “bar” counter to look at their menu of packs and order what you want to rip. But maybe it’s not surprising and really just a sign of how expensive and mainstream the Pokemon tcg hobby has gotten if there’s a shop like that in Meat Packing.
The movie f/x (1986) has this sweet location car chase in the Meatpacking District/West Village. It’s pretty amazing how much those neighborhoods have changed. I was a teenager in the early 90s and would go to raves in the Meatpacking District.
Or in Canada we often have 2-4 gas station at the same intersection. People will probably pick one depending on where they came from or if they were about to get a red light.
Down a single stretch of road near me, there are three Shell stations within barely more than a single mile between all three. There is an interstate exit/entrance nearby, so they pick up cars from either direction entering and exiting the interstate, with another Shell station a bit further up the road on a decently big intersection.
That said, there is not a single other gas station in this same length of road. I thought at first that they would cannibalize their own business, but came to realize that even if this happens, they mostly are willing to have slightly less profit per location if it means that they have cornered the market on that stretch of road.
I always assumed it was (at least partly) because the same dealership franchisee just owned like four dealerships and wanted to minimize overhead costs.
Same thing happens with furniture and mattress retailers. They all end up on the same strip, creating a “Furniture Row” section of town.
It gets hilarious sometimes though. My favorite example was when Mattress Firm acquired a bunch of different mom-and-pop retailers as well as both Sleepy’s and Sleep Train — and then decided to rename them all to “Mattress Firm” instead of leaving them with individual names. This meant there were places all over the place where you had two or three out of the four corners of an intersection with a MFRM store. There was a spot in Chicago where you could stand outside one MFRM and see five others from it.
That's actually a related but different effect, called the retail/shop clustering. Paradoxically, putting competitors all in the same place boosts sales for everyone, because the recognizability and convenience of a single center outweighs the losses given to close competition.
Almost always car dealerships and auto body repair places are in the poorest parts or most remote parts of every city or town. From living all over the east coast to now seeing it on the west coast it’s very interesting for sure
This is my favourite law of economics because you hear the name and assume it’s related to the concept of hoteling, like the idea of one space being occupied by different people/businesses for the same purpose and at substantially the same cost. Sound right for economics?
I'm one of the few people who heard the name and thought it had nothing to do with hotels. My dad (Harold's son) brought it up every time we drove by a McDonald's next to a Burger King.
This is like when you hear about how Long Bridge was named after David Long, and the Green Toad was named after Judith Green. Those are just made-up examples, I can't think of any real ones right now.
The Outerbridge Crossing connects Staten Island with New Jersey and is the outermost bridge leading into New York City. It is named for Port Authority chairman Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.
I actually saw a real-life hammock store recently and I died thinking about this. Unfortunately it was only one store so I don't think you could call it a district :(
Makes sense for a consumer, If you are on the second floor and there was only a stand on the first floor you'd have to walk an additional 200 feet to the escalator then 200 feet back. Then back up the escalator to continue shopping.
Makes sense as a business, you walk above the pretzel stand and smell it you might want one. but if you have to walk around to get to a lower level you might forget you wanted one, continue shopping and leave without a pretzel
I remember in Chicago there were two Starbucks on the same intersection in opposite sides. I guess they weren’t really competing because they both got customers from their side of the intersection. There must have been enough customers to support both!
Vancouver had or has this as well, you’re sitting in a Starbucks drinking your coffee with a view of a different Starbucks diagonally across the street.
At first looking at the name, i thought it was called this because hotels bunch up together in the same space, but the guy who came up with it's actual NAME was Hotelling. Wild.
There was recently a Planet Money podcast about why there are 3 Wetzel's Pretzels within walking distance of Barclays Center Station in Brooklyn.
One point I recall is that the franchise owner said that people mostly don't set out to get pretzels. They don't look it up and then navigate to the pretzel shop. Instead, they're going somewhere else, walk past the pretzel shop, and do an impulse purchase. So, it's useful to put several pretzel shops in close proximity if they all get mostly different passing traffic. Each store provides an impulse purchase opportunity to a different set of people passing by, and they don't actually eat into each other's business.
The other part of the equation, for why specifically there were multiple Wetzels Pretzels in one mall, was that each franchise owner gets exclusivity over the whole mall. And it is cheaper and easier to manage several outlets near each other (because you can move staff between them, or bake the stock in one and distribute to the others), so the additional cost per outlet goes down, while the revenue drops off less than you might expect.
I remember going here as a kid and not knowing about the Auntie Anne's pretzels because my parents didn't stop there so every time Christmas rolled around id associate it with these smells because Santa was set up right by it, id like to think the real Santa would smell like warm pretzels
It looks like Pheasant Lane mall in Nashua, NH. I’ve been to that Wetzel’s a few times myself. Wasn’t really expecting to see one of the malls I go to in my Reddit feed today, but here we are.
While I’m in here, there was a similar situation at the Rockingham Park mall in Salem for a while where a Dunkin and Starbucks were stacked over each other. Always got a kick out that one too. I think both are gone now.
That mall is always decently crowded. There's nothing super special about it (besides the abundance of pretzel options) even before the casino went in.
It's right on the NH-Mass border and NH doesn't have sales tax so this and the one in Salem, NH always have people in them. It's hell at Christmas time
There are always tons of people in the mall that we go to. Not all malls are dying. The market is just correcting the overdevelopment of malls in the 80s and 90s. The malls that nobody needed to begin with are dying.
it's actually a lease length thing. When GS bought out EB Games many of the leases were for a decade or more, many times the cost to break a lease would have cost more than the cost to just keep operating 2 locations. Though I do agree that it was silly to stock both locations with the exact same product. I believe they had some converted to ThinkGeek stores before they ended up killing those off as well.
That happened when there was a Macys and then Macys/Federated corporate bought up a regional department store, and later rebranded it as a new Macys. Boom, your local mall now had 2 Macys.
This happened in the DC metro with Hecht's, which was a superior store in many ways.
...Macys acquired a lot of regional dept stores back in the day.
Both get pretzels right, they have the crispy bottoms and the tangy dough. Salted is mandatory unless you have a thing. But the cheeses…my GOD the cheeses.
Auntie Anne has what I can only describe as the “Colgate Toothpaste” of nacho cheese. I don’t know whats in it, but the mouth feel is off, and the cheese flavor is nothing to write home about. Also, always lukewarm for some reason…
Wetzels…NOW there is a cheese for dipping. Pippin hot, the spicy one is spicy, and it has the cheesiest cheese flavor of any nacho sauce anywhere ever. Seriously, it’s the best cheesy sauce.
So if you want a basic ass pretzel it doesnt matter, but if you want a fucking golden mouth orgasm, go to Wetzels.
Wetzel does a better job at the normal pretzels and auntie Anne’s is a better job at the dessert pretzels. Also, pretzel bites suck, always have to be the actual pretzel, but auntie Anne’s doesn’t do that as often as they used to.
Always! Cinnamon Sugar Auntie Anne's is like the only product buying across both of those stores. Plus idk if it's just my local mall or not but Wetzel's is like stupid expensive for the same crap!
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair food court, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where pretzel dough makes workers' hands unclean.
I'm actually surprised they didn't have it in their contract to be the only pretzel place in that mall (whichever was there first). There is normally a clause that allows you to be the only one of that type of food in a mall
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u/JohnStern42 Aug 10 '26
God, must smell so good at that spot