The Squat’nGobble. The name of this roadside classic near, Bluffton, South Carolina, says it all. Even if you haven’t eaten here, you know what the brand promise is. This would be a place to squat…and gobble.
Travel these days offers lots of opportunities to experience modern-day, mass-market, globally branded “eating occasions” as they call mealtime in the QSR category. It’s quite possible to travel coast-to-coast without ever leaving the familiarity of the fast food chains everyone knows all too well. At the end of the trip, you may have changed locations, but have you traveled?
Only on the backroads, on the roads less traveled, do you find a Squat’nGobble. Or a “Tillie’s Tuesday-Only Tea Shoppe”. (It’s not open every day, if you hadn’t guessed.) Or the little Amish bakery near Yoder, Kansas, where they serve common sense and prairie wisdom along with your biscuits and gravy.
The point is pretty easy to grasp: when you get off the main road, you’re more likely to experience the memorable, the unique, the authentic. Good stories are a lot more likely to arise from a backroad trip than from another mind-numbing charge down the interstate. Likewise, good brand stories are more likely to arise from a backroad detour than from following the main road. Gobble on that.