Rather indulgant and unedited opinions about the personality of Chipotle
This week, DJ Paul Roth
I'm currently in a Chipotle, stealing Internet from Panera. For more about this exciting time, read below.
Tonight, Last "Solo Dancer" Lindy Hop Inter/Adv Class
What to do with your damn arms in partner Lindy Hop: a few ideas. Plus, possibly other moves and fun stuff.
Last Chance to Sign Up For ILHC before final price jump
DC holds the awesome International Lindy Hop Championships (www.ilhc.com) every year, and this year (Aug 19-22), it already is going to have incredible showing of Lindy Hop and swing dance talent. Final price hike happens at the end of this month. Register soon!
COLLEGIATE SHAG TASTER August 3 and 10
Collegiate Shag was an incredibly popular swing dance in the classic era and one that has a very strong cult following. Enjoy this two week taster which will give you more than enough to start your Collegiate Shag binge dancing. Both classes will cover the basic, then branch out in to different material from there. So, people can drop into any class as a pure beginner, but neither class will be the same material. $25 for both classes/dances together. Taught by our local shag awesomeness David and Chelsea.
LINDY HARD STUFF August 17, 24, 31
For the last three Tuesdays in August, the Jam Cellar will have, simply, Lindy Hard Stuff. We'll come up with stuff to challenge the entire class. We'll even have special guest instructors Mike and Laura from Texas, who are awesome, teaching whatever they want August 24! $35 for the entire series/dances.
Chiptole Diary, July 27, 2010 1:14 p.m.
Oh yeah, this contains nothing about swing dancing. But www.Swungover.com has an old Jam Cellar email writing on it today.
The recent storm took out the area's Comcast, and anyone who uses Comcast internet had the same idea as me, and I counted over 35 laptops in the tiny Panera. Not one single outlet was open, and all but one of the tables-for-four was taken by a lone laptop.
However, I soon had the ingenuous plan to go to the Chiptole next door and sit close to the Panera side of the building, an idea no one else has had. But, the signal is weak, the line is literally wrapped around the inside of the building, and I keep getting bumped by people who say "excuse me" as an expletive, as if they expect me to be able to scoot-in a bar stool riveted to a concrete floor. Question: does the stylishness of a Chipotle décor make up for the uncomfortable sensation of eating your lunch in a room made of almost nothing but air-conditioned sheet metal?
On top of that is the fact that, without fail, any taco you get at a Chipotle will have only three cubes of meat in it. Ask for more, and they get the manager. I try not to be too hard on them, though, as they are probably just making up for the amount of money they spend putting crack into the Guacamole. As much as I like the guacamole, however, there are still days when they get it wrong, when the chef obviously accidentally mistakes onion for avocado.
Chiptole is one of the many recent restaurants/products to put writings on their cups that obviously hope to show the restaurant has a personality. Unfortunately, it's the same personality they are all trying to get across: Slightly kooky, but not too much. Care about natural ingredients. Humorous, but only in the "Hey, can't office life be funny sometimes?" way. Real. Vaguely old-fashioned in its authenticity.
But that's old fashioned only in the "We have brown paper labels and napkins" sense, not in the "Hey there, Mr. White, the usual today?" sense or the "I built this store with love and I'm very proud of it." sense. (Or even in the "get out of my store, we don't like your kind here" sense, which would at least give credit to their claims, and would be hilarious if directed at lunch-break corporates.)
One of the cups tells the story of the original store, as if its owners are still involved with every part of the process. But it was bought by MacDonalds a long time ago, and now Mac Donalds has a market share in both the "cheap food for low income families" market and the market full of people who are likely to say "MacDonalds? Are you crazy? Let's get some real food and go to Chiptole."
Trying to give giant companies a friendly personality is nothing new to advertising, but it seems to be in full force. Chipotle, though, is only an upscale burrito place, and absolutely nothing more, it's not like it started off with any true mark of having a unique personality-there's not really any personality it really should have. Except perhaps as a very stingy young CEO, trying way too hard to be hip, the kind of person who would want there apartment to be decorated in nothing but sheet metal, the only thing warm in the place being the food you eat.
I don't have anything swing related for you today, though I guess you could apply the whole personality-advertising-Chipotle thing to the business of swing dancing easy enough. But if you're looking for kooky-swing-dance-related reading material, check out www.swungover.com, where I posted an old Jam Cellar email a lot of people seemed to like.