False Advertising, Bad Product

I'm skimming the headlines on the Commercial Appeal website and spot the following headline and slug: "Fresh Friday's":

New look, menu changes target lunch customers

T.G.I. Friday's, the decades-long gathering place at Overton Square, closed in 2003, promising to regroup and return.

So I'm thinking that TGI Friday's in Overton Square is about to re-open. Don't you?

But no, the article is all about the future expansion plans for TGIF in eastern Shelby County. The only talk about Overton Square comes from the owner of Paulette's:

For a long time the Overton Square store, which opened in 1970, just in time to take advantage of new liquor-by-the-glass laws here, was the oldest Friday's in the chain.

It closed in 2003 because "the facility was not holding up," Barton said.

But Falls, who own's Paulette's across the street from the former Friday's, suspected the old store in an old location couldn't reach corporate "volume levels. I sure miss them. They brought a lot of activity to the area."

I know that every time I went by there, it was always busy, day and night. Too bad the reporter didn't dig a little deeper to see if the rumored racism of the closing wasn't in play. Certainly the rest of article says nothing that counters the public perception.

But that's not all, as the pitchmen say. The article also committed a couple of sins. First was the pervasive and annoying use of cheat quotes. When a reporter doesn't just print a person's words, but chops them up and summarises the rest, it's almost always a sign of something not being passed along. Or, sometimes, of a sloppy reporter fitting a person's words into their template of what needs to be said.

Read this:

The goal is to "deepen Nashville and Memphis" with corporate-owned stores, adding three to six locations in "two-plus" years, he said.

"The brand is now 40 years old," he said. "We're just starting to crank it and grow."

The chain, owned by Dallas-based Carlson Restaurants Worldwide Inc., pioneered the "fun, casual dining" fern bar genre in 1965, seating diners around a prominent bar lit with Tiffany-style lamps....

Thriving in a "sea of sameness" means differentiating from "the chicken finger, hamburger and rib" everyone else has, Barton said. "We're changing our exteriors and interiors and working on food quality."

It means not only new menu items but competing with the quick-service restaurants for lunch customers.

"Our challenge is to be fast and have great food for lunch," Barton said, adding that Friday's is working on getting people "in and out faster than in the past."

It's admirable, Paul says, but "occasion still dictates" where people go to eat.

"Dinner (the evening meal) is still Friday's busiest meal. People choose it because they want to sit down" and be served, he said.

Visually painful and tough on comprehension. I also suspect that at least a couple of those "quotes" may not be actual quotes but the reporter setting off cliches or descriptors. But with this gumbo, who can tell?

Then there is this:

Now, like any 40-year-old, the chain is relying on cosmetics to get noticed.

Since I don't know any 40 year old men using cosmetics (but then I don't hang with the metrosexual crowd), she can only be talking about women. And what she says is the most awful, condescending kind of sexism I've seen in a while, much less seen in newspaper reporting. Shame, shame, shame.