Monday, June 25, 2012

Breakfast With The Mayor At Bob Evans... Again

Mayor Bill Foster is having his next "Breakfast with the Mayor" event at Bob Evans restaurant, again. Although this one will be at a different branch of the Ohio-based, billion-dollar, 570 location restaurant chain's stores than Mayor Foster held his Breakfast event at just two months ago. What does it say about the Mayor that less than a week before "Independents Week" he is holding yet another event at a major chain restaurant? In fact, half of Foster's Breakfast events this year have been held at major chain restaurants instead of the dozens of local restaurants that offer breakfast.

Looking back at the last two years, Mayor Foster chose to hold these informal Breakfast events almost exclusively at locally owned restaurants or institutions, so what changed this year? The answer may lie in what kind of effect having the Mayor over for breakfast has on the host restaurant. We talked to a couple of employees at one of the restaurants that hosted a Breakfast with the Mayor a while back, and were told that "all of our regulars stayed away when they heard that the Mayor was going to be here, we were less than half full until after he left, then things returned to normal". Or maybe it has more to do with Mayor Foster's recent revelation at a Lens Pier visioning meeting that he encourages people to shop at large corporate-owned stores instead of locally owned establishments. Either way, it's another slap in the face of the whole "shop local" movement, just a week after he posed for a picture at the proclamation ceremony for Independents Week.

Just a side note while we are on the subject of the Mayor promoting things from outside of the city, can someone tell the person in charge of the City of St. Petersburg's facebook page that the picture taken from the Sunshine Skyway Bridge looking up at the support cables, which is currently set as the main background picture on the city's page, was taken in Hillsborough County, not St. Petersburg? We have enough problems being confused with Tampa, and that doesn't help.

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