What with my penchant for profiling troubled merchants, I've been rightly called the Grim Reaper of Retail. It's simple: if you look up from your cash drawer to see me and my tripod wandering around the parking lot, your ledger is red. 'Why's that?' you ask... I'll tell you. Because the suits don't send me to check on businesses operating in the black. Rather, they dispatch me to the brink of ruin. By the time that I arrive, registers are wrung dry, regulars are dropping by with sympathy cards and soemone's always sleeping up. Yep, I've stumbled into more Mom and Pop shops on their very last day of existence than most inventory liquidation teams...
Which is why today was such a pleasure. Instead of picking clean the bones of a failed business plan, I got to bask in the glow of hope, promises and hush-puppies. See, Mayflower Seafood may have been down, but they were never out. Three years ago, news crews from every outlet turned out to watch the restaurant chain's original location spit fire into the sky. Today, when they flung open their doors to slather the Piedmont in popcorn shrimp, only one electronic lenslinger had the decency to wipe his feet. When I did, I found a sprawling Greek family with names impossible to pronounce. Rather than try, I rambled around like I owned the place, sticking my lens into kitchen, waitress station, even the Men's Room once the sweet tea got to me. Along the way I scored plenty of shots of people chewing; a neat feet considering most folk don't wanna be pictured masticating. No bother, I was too busy envisioning a giant breaded trout rising from the ashes of the old Mayflower site before taking flight over that city locals simply call 'Winston'...
Perhaps it was something I ate.
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