Photograph by © Eric Shindelbower
I don’t visit restaurants like Applebee’s or T.G.I. Friday’s very often so when I do I tend to be more fascinated (and demoralized) than I probably should be. The signature kitschy decor, which attempts to imitate a more natural accumulation of mementos, seems just the kind of dreary, instant local culture effect that a global corporation would be intent on producing (and a rootless suburban population open to consuming). Indeed, I had assumed from the start that the so-called memorabilia was in fact manufactured and made to look old and used, that nothing on the walls was actually local, much less authentic.
Michael Tunison’s 2005 Washington Post article, “A Side of Decor“, overturned these assumptions and revealed a much more interesting story. As it turns out, the memorabilia isn’t fake, the autographs are real, and the many antique fixtures aren’t actually picked out of a mail-order catalog. Instead, with great ingenuity, a small community of hired rummagers, aficionados, and interior designers scour the earth for genuine novelties and authentic artifacts, moving town to town setting up local variation after variation.
For example, Scott Schershel, vice president of Florida-based Interior Spaces Inc., an art vendor for Ruby Tuesday, and Deborah Conrad, owner of a South Carolina-based company called Prismatic Interior Works, work as decor suppliers for the chain. According to the WP article, Schershel and Conrad
hire “pickers” to explore flea markets and rummage sales to find their stuff; then they oversee the installation. Conrad said her personal record was the year she spent 256 nights away from home, decorating yet more Ruby Tuesdays. [...] “We used to give the restaurants a little local flavor,” Schershel said. “We would contact local museums and archival societies to find old photos and other stuff related to the area. If there was a college nearby, we’d prominently feature things related to a sports team at the college.”
But as decor styles shift to more recent time periods, the strategies required to acquire the appropriate memorabilia have also shifted, causing something of an upheaval amongst the decor suppliers. The WP article describes how in 2002 T.G.I Friday’s undertook a corporate-mandated makeover that called for “a slightly less-cluttered update with pop-culture touchstones that evoke the mid-1960s to mid-1990s. That means skateboards, bicycles, classic rock and new-wave album covers, surfboards, disco balls.” But these kinds of things just can’t be as easily found at flea markets and rummage sales; the treasure hunter would instead have to rummage through their modern-day counterpart: eBay. “Which is where Michelle Edwards comes in.
Based in Nashville, Edwards, 39, is Friday’s principal supplier of decor. She’s been with the company for 13 years, part of the old guard of collectors — a group of treasure hunters hired to fan out to various garage sales and flea markets in Tennessee in search of antiques and other quaint clutter to send to wherever a new Friday’s was about to open. [...] When the corporate office decided to switch looks, most of Edwards’s old-guard collectors “didn’t see it as doable,” she said, because “when we went to this newer look, it was harder to find because it wasn’t surfacing in the flea markets.” She persisted on her own, and eBay and other Internet sites amply provided most of the ephemera that Friday’s needs.
In many ways, to be sure, work like Edwards’ creates (rather than sustains) nostalgia for pop-cultures past. It’s simply not yet clear to what extent chain decor strategies, when executed on such a large scale, set or determine what is, and what isn’t, a ‘memory’ worth reproducing. (We can credit Edwards’ many precursors for our disturbingly sterilized image of the 50’s.)
Indeed, as period styles move forward in time, we will likely feel increasingly challenged by decor decisions. That Michelle Edwards is now looking for vintage laptops on the web, rather than old road signage at a junk yard, is a sure sign of a changing pop-culture nostalgia terrain. So if, as Michael Tunison remarks, we have yet to “put a finger on the failed joviality of the retail age — and its air of enforced cheer, sentimental prefab and the replication of nostalgia”, it looks like there will be time yet for the ‘internet generation’ to hammer out a description. I only hope that the process by which our increasingly not-so-distant past gets churned into nostalgiac form becomes more a subject of critique than an object of ridicule. Disenchanted jabs at servers’ vest “flare” might just betray how little we take seriously the representation of our own recent history.
