Where Are the Big Businesses?

St Andrews is outdated. It is full of local, independent, family-run businesses: it’s time these “quaint” burdens left the town and big businesses moved in. Why can’t our town be as aggressively commercial as it could be? Every time I walk up and down the three streets, I see the few restaurant chains that we have and wonder why there aren’t more. Wouldn’t Toppings be better off as a Poundland? Wouldn’t Taste make a great Dunkin’ or Spoiled Life literally anything else? These quaint little corner shops need to be updated for the 21st century. Time is money, and I won’t spend ten minutes waiting for a third-rate, lukewarm cup of sad stew at any one of these jumped-up, wannabe Wild Bean Cafes. 

We need more fast-food restaurants. No one has ever heard of Saint Sizzle — wouldn’t it be better off as a Five Guys since that is exactly what it fails to be? Cut out the middleman. Out with Saint Sizzle and their questionable quarter-pounders and flaccid fries! Bring in Five Guys — perhaps then that ramshackle little shed of a place would see a shred of life in it. Blackhorn already blasts their food, so why not seamlessly convert it into an incineration plant? The problem with a lot of these places is that they can’t cope with hyper-modernisation and speed. We aren’t all Italian; we don’t all work twelve-hour weeks with biblically long siestas. We need speed and we need immediacy. Improvise, adapt, overcome — that is the motto of Bear Grylls, a former SAS soldier, who reached the summit of Everest and survived a parachute accident. I don’t think we should be taking inspiration from Italy, anyway — they haven’t even knocked down the bloody Colosseum yet (which would make for a great drive-thru). 

These charming little spots are unique, but it's high time they make way for massive corporations. St Andrews is an old university; it needs updating. These poor fellas in Silicon Valley are struggling to make a quick buck out here in St Andrews. The Cinema is going the right way selling out to Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake. Let’s hope the trend continues. I remember hearing that McDonalds applies every year to open a restaurant here but that the council always blocks it — the injustice of it all! We must facilitate Big Macs and chicken nuggets for the inebriated students. St Andrews Shawarma House, Big Boss, Empire — the St Andrews trinity — cannot compete with such delicatessen. It is time they pulled the plug on kebabs and ended the St Andrews salmonella streak! We need to think more like Ray Kroc and less like Michael Portillo.

Farmore Interiors is particularly lovely, and I have spent many happy hours wandering through, but I think a B&Q would be better. Perhaps an IKEA – then their meatballs would provide a decent Italian dish countering the cultural appropriation from Little Italy. And even the hotels — knock down the dreadful, Scottish, modern architecture of the Russacks. Dig up Christopher Wren and get him to design a decent Premier Inn, a proper establishment. None of that artisan, handmade crap. The bricks in One Under aren’t even real. Whoever it was that allowed that yellow wart of a hotel on the seventeenth shouldn’t bother chasing a career in architecture. Raze it to the ground and build a Hilton. Perhaps only then can people stay and leave with a little sense of dignity that the most famous course in the world has not been given herpes.

Image from Wikimedia Commons