You Can Spot That Mickey D's a Mile Away... But Why?

“Part of my thought on approaching it this way is that every time I'm meeting someone even remotely close to that area they say: Over by Sam's Club. Even if it's a mile away.”

—Kris Janisch on the Woodbury Patch Facebook site

This is a phenomenon known as “landmark geography” and, to differing extents, we all do it. 

How many times have you given directions to someone and said, “Take a left at the McDonald's, a right at the and then it’s the third driveway on the left.” Before we had interactive navigation systems built into our cars and phone, this was one of the more common ways for people to give directions. 

The landmarks that you would give would depend on how familiar with the local area you judged the person to be.

If it was a local resident, you might say, “It’s just after the Johnson’s store." If you both were long-time local residents, the “Johnson’s store” might not even still be the “Johnson’s store” anymore, having gone through several owners in the interim. 

If they were out-of-towners (as evidenced by their inability to pronounce simple Minnesota place names like “Shakopee”, “Mahtomedi” or “Minnetonka”), you’d resort to the most basic of landmarks such as fast food places, gas stations, and big box stores.

Have you ever considered why you can tell someone to take a left at the and, unless they’re distracted, they’ll usually be able to do it? It’s not because the golden arches have any sort of magical powers (well, other than the ability to enlarge the waistline of your humble scribe).

It’s because that, prior to their recent architectural rebranding, you could spot a McDonald's a mile away due to the mansard roof and other architectural cues, both subtle and not. This is the same with most other fast food chains, national and regional gas stations, and big box stores.

It’s called “franchise architecture," and one of the first to use it was the Pure Oil Company in the mid 1920s.  Before franchise architecture, roadside stores would compete with gaudy, outlandish designs that would attempt to gain drivers attention by beating their retinas into submission. (You still see this occasionally in the auto sales business where every dealership has some inflatable gorilla, bounce castle, pirate ship, or other object to gain attention.)

Since then, franchisers have sought to create a unique template that can be rolled out with minor variations almost anywhere. As a planner, I once received a site plan for a (one of three being built in that city at the time) that had it located at the corner of “Insert Street Name Here” and “Place Cross Street Here.”

Even after the business closes and gets converted to a new use,  it retains quite a bit of franchise look.

A drive down Point Douglas Road in Cottage Grove between 80th and Jamaica will show a drive-in restaurant that’s now an insurance agency, a grocery store converted to a school administration building, as well as various and sundry other 1950s/60s-era buildings that have been reused.

Franchise architecture, in itself, isn’t a bad thing. 

Until recently, though, cities didn’t realize that franchisers had more than one template. A well-to-do suburb might get a nicer version of the same establishment and a less affluent one might get a “lowest common denominator” design. Even with the upscale template, Woodbury has proven, façade materials can be changed, mechanical units can be screened, buffers between incompatible uses can be created that do not extinguish all the architectural cues.

This tweaking of the franchise architecture raises the bar for future structures as well. As a planner, it is much easier to say to a franchiser, “Look at what your competitors had to do to enter the city.  We’re not requiring you to do anything beyond what they were required.”   

This attention to the small details, in my opinion, is why Woodbury will continue to maintain value even after it is built out and the “newest, coolest community” is a couple of miles down the road

And that’s the view from the big steel drafting table.

Here's a link to a former Pure Oil Gas Station in St. Paul. Keep an eye out for them when you're out and about. You can find them all over the country.