Remembering Sambo's and the customers who made sure they went out of business

[symposes]

Yep. Incredibly offensive.

Exactly, how dare they lie about those poor people, they never had anything. They cant be proper Indians if they have money! /sarcasm

The problem is that until people stop letting stupid things get to them, racist and other things like it, will never go away.

A man running for a public office, i think a local council, lost the election.
One of my coworkers said he refused to vote for this man, for one reason.
That being, the man said "Finally we can have a black man on the council."
My coworker said, it made this man look racist, that it made him look like he hated white people, so he refused to vote for him. He continued to say, had the man started with what he had planned to do about local problems, he would have voted for him, because up til that point, he seemed to be the only one worth voting for.

On a side note that is related though, I read an article once, that said racism will never end, until the communities that are affected by it, remove it from themselves. ie, Change comes from within.
As in, If a black person succeeds in a "white mans" world, ie corporate rat race. There are other black people, who would call them an oreo. Meaning black on the outside, white on the inside.
This is absurd to me, How else can someone prove they are equal, except to excel where they are compared?
Women didnt prove they were equal by staying at home and doing laundry. They got out in the "man's" world and proved they could do the same jobs, just as well, if not better.

And as for the N word, I am appaled by that as well. That is just another way of keeping the "races" seperated. You will never hear a white man, in all seriousness call another white man cracker. Yet you hear lots of black men use the N word to address other black men/women. And they think this is okay?

As George Carlin said though, You dont mind when Eddie Murphy or Richard Prior say it, why? because they are n.....

Course his point was that words mean nothing, it is the context associated with them that means something. Unfortunitly in this day and age, everyone takes it at face value. I just feel there are too many double standards to take it any other way.

[Crosshair]

I humbly submit that there are plenty of people who are more than happy to be referred to as a Redneck. I assure you, the origins of the term were not meant to flatter.

Waves hand while driving $300 car down a gravel road at 50 mph with a soda between his legs.

[iradney]

Slightly OT, in SA, the afrikaans term for N**** is k*****. and yet, there is a tree called the k*****tree. very strange

back on-topic, it is really surprising how people will mis-read the surface meaning of something just to suit themselves. i suppose for some people their day is wasted if they haven't accused someone of being racist/sexist/ageist/ist-ist....

[Rahmota]

Quote:
Originally Posted by nick1091
I humbly submit that there are plenty of people who are more than happy to be referred to as a Redneck. I assure you, the origins of the term were not meant to flatter.

Crosshair:
Waves hand while driving $300 car down a gravel road at 50 mph with a soda between his legs.

Gotcha beat. Driving a 17year old PICKUP with rust and primer dual pipes that was 500$. Unfortunately the road is paved but the driveway is gravel at least.

But yeah people are a bit too sensitive on some things. Remember the outcry when "Gasp" The General Lee in the Dukes of Hazzard movie had the rebel flag on the roof. Oy vey.

[BlakeMP]

If you don't like what's depicted in a restaurant, go eat somewhere else. If you don't like what they show on TV, find a book to read, or change the channel. Stop ruining it for everyone else.

Amen to that.

It seems to me that there's a percentage of the population (a percentage pretty evenly distributed among all races, religions and genders) that simply isn't happy unless it can find something to complain about.

[Rahmota]

Originally Posted by greensinestro
If you don't like what's depicted in a restaurant, go eat somewhere else. If you don't like what they show on TV, find a book to read, or change the channel. Stop ruining it for everyone else.

Yeah but if they arn't able to try and live/run other people's lives that would mean they would have to get one of their own.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

All I can say on that is:

Welcome to the United States - Home of the Perpetually Offended.

IE, it doesn't matter anymore what someone says or does as there's someone who's hellbent and determined to be offended over it.

[HYHYBT]

It doesn't matter anymore what someone says or does as there's someone who's hellbent and determined to be offended over it.

True! Someone once called the office to complain because I'd told her "good morning" and she was offended because it was not, in fact, morning at the time. Much more recently, someone threw a fit because, at the end of the transaction, I said "have fun" instead of "have a nice day". And flat out refused to say why "have fun" was offensive or even acknowledge the possible existence of people not bothered by the phrase or that there was any way I could possibly not have known it would upset him.

(Reading that over, it *does* sound made up. I hardly believe it myself, but it's unembelished truth. I don't think I *could* make up a story: everything I could imagine either I've witnessed or read about here already!)

More on-topic for the thread, if not the board, I'd never heard of Sambo's until now. We did used to have a restaurant chain named Po'Folks, which seems to have renamed itself Folks for no announced reason. I haven't been in one in about fifteen years, but part of their theme was you drank out of jars.

[tignish]

ever see the movie "Song of the South"??

If you live in the United States and were born after 1972 you haven't.

welcome to the home of the brave and the land of the free??

[HYHYBT]

I was born in 1974, and saw it in a theater in 2nd grade or so.

[Channard]

Most people will complain, just to complain. It is a sad world, when they do something like that.

It seems to be more like they pretend to be offended on behalf of other people so they don't have to deal with issues that involve anything other than writing angry letters to the local paper.

[greensinestro]

What I don't understand is why they couldn't have altered their name, kept the same flair and flavor of the restaurant, and continued to be successful?

I'm having a wierd Ghost World flashback with this thread....

Actually, they attempted to change the name to "A Taste Of Sam's" if I remember correctly. However, the damage was done and the offended ones were not going to settle with anything until the chain was out of business.

[Maevis]

While there were complaints about the name, I'm pretty sure Sambo's failed after it was bought out by a corporation...maybe Marriott? Something about expanding too fast, or dealing with lawsuits about defrauding (is that a word?) it's employees.

The name thing seems to be the issue everyone harps on though.

Dang my memory, now I have to go look it up.

[Maevis]

I just love insomnia...

Anyway, I did a little bit of research, and frankly the intranet sucks as far as finding reliable information on the downfall of Sambos.

Here are some of the different reasons given for the demise of the Sambo's chain:

1. People offended by the name shut it down. (while I've seen that lawsuits were brought against the sambo's chain in regards to the name, this honestly, seems to have been a very small part of the problem.)

2. Inconsistency of food/service from restaraunt to restaraunt. (Eh, sure, ok, this could be another contributing factor, but only found one reference to it it by someone writing an article on the need for chains to have consistant and standardized food)

3. At some point it seems that the company or portion of the company was bought out by an investment corporation that may or may not have been associated with the Mariott corp. And here it starts to get even fuzzier...

The original Sambo's company had an incentive-franchise plan called the Fraction of the Action. Basically, if you were a restaruant employee and you worked for X number of years and put in X number of dollars, you could eventually buy a franchise of your own at a reduced price. Some of the articles I read said that it was a fraudulent pyramid scheme. Some said that the original Sambo's company would have honored the plan but when the company was bought out, the investment company refused to acknowledge that the plan even existed. Either way, people lost money and there were several lawsuits brought about in regards to this.

4. There were other lawsuits brought against the company near the end by employees claiming racial discrimination, that didn't seem to have anything to do with the name, but more to do with hiring/promotion/and treatment. Since those lawsuits seem to have been filed in the early 80's, I'm not sure if that had been on ongoing problem within the company or became an issue when the company was bought out and under new management, or if it was a problem only at specific franchises.

5. Expanding too fast and not having the money to properly support the stores with supplies/advertising etc...(which may have been a factor in selling to an investment company in the hopes of revitalizing the chain with an outside source of money)

Sorry, I don't have all of the links, etc...wasn't planning on writing a research paper. But just thought I would share some of what I stumbled across.

Anyway, the point is, the downfall of Sambo's was not brought about simply because there were people taking issue with the name of the business.