I find it amusing how people constantly want to label things, but they so dislike being labeled themselves. Nonetheless, we like labels. Now we don't want anyone actually using them to specifically refer to us, but in a general sense, people love to classify things. How else do you explain the memes and quizzes so popular on the internet? People simply want to know how to rank themselves among others.
Luckily, I don't care (much) for those things, and I won't bore you (at all) with any more of them. At least for today. But the concept of labeling things in a more general sense has always been interesting. Greek mythology gave us the Ages of Man. We've seen the industrial age. Some people now say that we're in the information age. I don't think so.
I think it much more likely that we're in the franchise age. How else do you explain the explosion of franchises? And by franchises, I mean in the sense of something being a franchise - such as a name brand - as opposed to an individual location of a larger corporation, like Subway. Though the latter isn't necessarily precluded either.
For instance, say you need something. How often do you run down to the five-and-dime? How many of you even knew that there was something called the five-and-dime? The dollar store is about as close as we get to those prices these days.
But I'm sitting here trying to think about it, and it has been a long time since I've been to anything that's not owned by some large corporation. We do try to go to smaller, locally owned restaurants if we go out, but for retail? Very rare that we even make it past Wal-Mart, and if we do it's down the road to Target or Home Depot. I can't even imagine how people got by in earlier times. That must be an indication that we're doing something.
