Business Signs
Signs change over time. The nature of a business might change, or maybe not, but the signs always seem to change. Of course we’re talking about a pretty broad time window, but I’ll provide an example.
Last week I’d finished my marketing and was leaving the local Trader Joe’s Market. Now I’ve lived in my neighborhood since I was in High School, and that’s quite a long time, so I swear that I can remember when my local Trader Joe’s was named Pronto Market. The employees tell me that this could not be so, because although I’m old enough to remember Pronto Markets, they say that Pronto only existed in Pasadena and by the time the market was built in my neighborhood the founder had sold the chain and it had been renamed Trader Joe’s Market.
Anyway, it’s named Trader Joe’s now and as I left the market I looked across the parking lot at the bank, which has changed hands several times, and at the butcher shop. When I first moved into the neighborhood the butcher shop had a large, back lit, Plexiglas sign along the front advertizing “British Butcher Shoppe.” I’m pretty sure that there was an “PE” on the end of shop, but I couldn’t swear to there being a “Ye Olde” prefix on the name. The sign was, for some reason, divided into a left hand section taking up roughly 3/4 of the store front proclaiming the business name in black lettering on a white background. The right hand 1/4 of the sign was a series of red and blue triangles and rectangles glued onto the white background so as to create a British flag. A sort of Plexi-Jack. The flag wasn’t really very well done, as if the artist’s heart wasn’t quite in it when he’d been handed the project. When I pointed this out to my father he hypothesized that no one had probably wanted to make the flag in the first place, and that the nature of the sign itself, divided into a 3/4 left section and a 1/4 right section had probably forced the owner to just ‘do something’ with the surplus space on the right.
Time passed, and one day I noticed that the left hand portion of the sign now announced that the business was an Italian Butcher Shop. No “PE” on the end of shop this time. The new background was still white, but now the lettering was green and red. One surmises that the entire business had changed hands, but only the left hand 3/4 of the sign changed. The right hand 1/4 remained a Plexiglas Union Jack. Perhaps it was just too much trouble, or money, to change the flag portion of the sign.
More time passed, and the Italian butcher seems to have sold out to an Iranian butcher. The left hand 3/4 of the sign remained red, white and green. To Anglo-Saxon eyes there were some undecipherable squiggles along the bottom of the sign, which I assumed to be a repetition of the main message in the Farsi language. However, the Union Jack remained.
Then there was that unpleasantness between the US and Iran involving hostages at the US embassy, and the Iranian butcher shop suddenly became a Persian Butcher. The Farsi letters remained along the bottom of the sign, but now the Union Jack was turned around with the back side of the flag facing out. This meant that during the day the right hand 1/4 of the sign was a blurry sort of smudge, and at night when the back lights were illuminated the Persian Butcher had, unintentionally, a muddy version of the Scottish flag - the cross of St. Andrew - showing through on the right hand of the sign, because that’s what the Plexiglas Union Jack, turned backwards, with electric lights shining through it, looked like.
Well, last week I looked at the sign again, and now it’s completely different. Now it’s a yellow Plexiglas background along the whole sign. The left hand 3/4 proclaims “Bob’s Best Meat,” and where the flag used to be on the right is the announcement “And Mail Boxes.”
I’m glad that the new, or even old, owner has solved his British flag problem, but I have to admit that ‘Meat & Mail Boxes’ is not the sort of business model I might have come up with on my own.