RoadsideOnline

Doc's Little Gem Diner in Syracuse, New York is up for sale. Once again, we have yet another diner case study on how not to run your diner. Another "I told you so". Despite all efforts from diner people for over a decade, Doc argued for too long that people should be able to smoke in his diner, and as a result he lost alot of customers. From my own experiences, and having spent considerable time in Syracuse, I never ate at Doc's because of the smoking. I spent my diner $ elsewhere.

Doc also disliked Syracuse, New York Fire Dept regulations too, so instead of finding a more eye-pleasing solution, he bludgeoned his diner to spite them all — cutting awful holes in the Formica ceiling and installing an unsightly sprinkler system — the cheapest type he could install — just to prove his point. Ugly, exposed bare, unpainted metal pipes running the length of the diner ceiling. The only thing he accomplished was making his diner feel even more depressing inside. Low rent.

I finally found Charlie’s Diner!

Well, one of them. And I didn’t really find it, someone found it for me. But let me bask in my success in any case, because discovery is one of the charms of the Mom ‘N Pop Culture.

There was no special magic, mind you, about Charlie’s Diner. My quest had more to do with my destination. At least a few times each year I’d find myself on the way up to the Eastern States Exhibition grounds in West Springfield, Mass., to participate in shows related to the racing-trade. I used to publish a small racing magazine that covered the sport here in New England, you see.

Once the shows started I was a slave to my booth, but after setting up the day before a show I’d have a little time to meander back to my Rhode Island home. What better way to spend a bit of it than by tucking in to lunch at a local diner. Yet I still was a babe in the woods of diner exploration. I’d google "diners" and "Springfield, Mass.," and get a couple of names. And the one that would catch my attention would be Charlie’s, right there in West Springfield.

In answer to the question posed by the author, I would remind him of what the retail dreadnaught has already done to countless other small American manufacturers who opted to sell to them. Walmart's modus operandi is to get the product in the pipeline and then drive its own purchase price down to where it become completely unprofitable. Manufacturer goes bust, and Walmart seeks new source from China. It remains to be seen if this pattern will repeat itself with local agriculture.

Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save the small farm and make America healthy?

By Corby Kummer

BUY MY FOOD at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.

Story and video continues here.

Here it is, folks. Yes, I get more requests for number one than anything, so tonight I spent a fair amount of time scanning, cleaning up, and uploading a pristine copy for your reading enjoyment.

Aside from its (obvious) historic value, this simple four-page tabloid contains little actual information about the topic we had pledged to cover. Our first map of Massachusetts barely contains 40 diners. In a couple of years, we'd track down another 100 and list them in our first Diner Finder map.

Issue one left the presses in October, 1990. Printed in Brookline, Massachusetts by a printer now long out of business, Marjorie Norman and I then distributed them to the countertops of about a dozen diners in Massachusetts, and one in Connecticut: O'Rourke's. We printed 5,000 copies, most of which I'm sure found their way into the trash bin with old napkins, newspapers, and greasy placemats.

I produced the issue mostly on my first Macintosh computer, a Mac Plus, but because I had yet to buy my first scanner, the photos were half-toned by a production shop in Needham, Mass. I then pasted them into the layout, which I constructed in Aldus Pagemaker. I still have the original boards. The next three issues were produced using Pagemaker and output on high resolution imagesetters.

The diners that appear in this issue are the Brunch Bar Restaurant (now the Windsor Diner), Windsor, Vermont, the Empire Diner, Herkimer, New York, the Main Street Diner (now Lanna Thai) in Woburn, Massachusetts, the Salem Diner in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Day & Night Diner in Palmer, Massachusetts.

Download here.