An Epidemic Of Bad Taste

A few weeks ago we ranted about, I mean, reviewed The Upstate Be’s Best of the Upstate Reader’s Choice Awards. The winners of this survey ranged from questionable picks to downright offense establishments.  As a result, we may have made some broad generalizations about the collective intelligence of the Anderson community.

In the days that followed our posting of “Adios Andertucky” a few things occurred that make us want to expand on things just a bit.

The week after The Upstate Be published the winners of their reader’s choice awards the Greenville News followed suit with their own version of the contest. Every insult we threw at the voting public in Anderson’s awards can also be directly applied to the Greenville audience.  Actually, our distaste should be multiplied tenfold given the greater variety of options that Greenville offers.

I will not totally rehash our complaints with Greenville’s so-called “winners”.  We will simply note that Greenville’s voting public thinks that Bi-Lo is a better grocery store than The Fresh Market, Chuck FM is a better radio station than WNCW on 97.3, and that they do not see the  insanity in voting for Papa John’s and Harbor Inn as the best anything-in-the-entire-universe.  Sure, they got a few things right but for the most part Greenville did not differentiate itself from Andertucky one iota. 

Also notable is the fact that The Upstate Be had the courtesy to incorporate the contest results as part of their regularly scheduled weekly issue.  They even added some insight as to how and why each “winner” was worthy of its honor.  To the contrary, The Greenville News released a standalone publication burying less than a page’s worth of winners inside 12 pages of advertisements.  Does it add to the credibility of an award when the announcement sits adjacent to advertisements for the winners? I would say “No, it just makes the game look rigged” but that is just my opinion…

Ok, that is just about enough negativity for the moment.  A bigger lesson has come from all of this and we feel that it is important to share the positive side of the issue instead of continuing to question why-in-God’s-name anyone would introduce a national chain into any local awards conversation.

The important thing is this:  You guys get it.  Despite what the voting (m)asses have to say, the people that visit this silly little web page run against the popular grain and like pretty cool stuff.  

In the aftermath of posting “Adios Andertucky” this site received at least triple the traffic we are accustomed to seeing.  People shared the link on Facebook, commented on the website, and even sent e-mails thanking us for writing what so many others were already thinking.  I even received text messages from people that made me ask “How the hell did they get my phone number?”

For the first time since the inception of this site we really felt like we struck a chord with our community.  Instead of just sharing our stories for our own amusement we felt like we connected to a subset of the population that actually thinks the way we do.  The compliments were flattering but the big prize was finding out how many people read this site and really get what we are all about.

When we started this page it was little more than A) an outlet to share our thoughts publicly and B) talk about cool places we like with the handful of friends and family that might actually visit our page.  Somewhere along the way it evolved into just us telling stories about our somewhat-eccentric little family unit.  Now, after the response to “Adios Andertucky”, well, we are not quite sure what we are.

I guess you could call us anti-establishment hippies that hate Wal-Mart, Papa John's, Nickleback and everything else that is crowded, generic, and annoying. This can actually be pretty cliché in and of itself so we would like to ask for a pass on that one.  Instead we hope to be a fun-loving couple with a child 50% of the time, a drinking problem 80% of it, and a desire to support unique, quality local businesses 100%.  Somewhere in the mix we will take the time to write about something you might think is neat… and if not hopefully we can make you chuckle at a bad joke or two.

Thanks for reading!