Tag Archives: boundaries

Grocery stores as geographic boundary markers, California edition

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Could the distribution of two grocery stores demarcate the boundary between Northern and Southern California?

Photo by Matheus Cenali on Pexels.com

If you’re shopping for bananas in NorCal, you’d likely head over to the nearest Safeway. But if you travel south of King City in Monterey County, that familiar chain is no longer an option — but the inside of Vons, found throughout SoCal, will feel eerily familiar. No matter where you are, there’s a clap of thunder before the produce aisle endures a quick “rainstorm.” 

That’s because the stores are owned by the same company and have been since 1997. After decades of competition, Safeway acquired Vons and eventually the stores had the same bright interior, wide aisles and even the same loyalty numbers. They’ve even adopted the same color red for their logo. Some Californians may not even realize they’re both owned by the same company and yet, they’ll still have a preference for one or the other. 

“It’s a common industrywide practice to keep the brand name that locals are familiar with in their region. There is a sense of pride among shoppers when they shop at their local supermarket,” Safeway spokesperson Wendy Gutshall told SFGATE.

Not all might agree with this:

Plenty of Californians would be offended by this discussion altogether, with no murmur of the very real Central California designation thrown in.

Where one neighborhood ends and the next begins or where a region stops and another begins can be contentious. How many names and areas should there be/ Which trait or pattern to consider? What if public opinion is mixed or divided?

Sometimes there are official or authoritative designations that can help. If the Census Bureau says your state is in the Midwest even though might consider themselves to live in another region, that is an authoritative voice. Or if online maps start labeling a neighborhood by a particular name, this reinforces that name.

What is interesting here is that this designation involves one major grocery company that has locations of two of its brands to geographic areas that do not overlap. What would happen if Albertsons started a Safeway in San Diego or a Vons in San Jose? Would people refuse to go there? Would expats from the other region flock to a more familiar store? There are other grocery stores – such as Walmart or Costco – that span both regions.

Chicago, northern Illinois not part of Wisconsin in order to help free states

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The original northern border of the state of Illinois was the southern tip of Lake Michigan but Nathaniel Pope helped change this:

[T]he shrewd move in 1818 by Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois Territory’s delegate in Congress, to relocate the original proposed boundary from the southern tip of Lake Michigan is regarded as a decisive event in Illinois history…

Pope’s move provided the groundwork for Chicago to become Illinois’ economic juggernaut and literally turned state politics upside-down as the area grew. But it also had the national implication of ensuring Illinois would be a free state at a time of percolating political unrest over slavery…

Congress “wanted to have a water route between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River for shipping supplies and soldiers if needed, since the Ohio River route could become contested,” said Olson, co-author of a new book “Managing Mississippi and Ohio River Landscapes” that includes a chapter on the northern border.

Along with giving Illinois access to Lake Michigan, Pope’s border modification raised the population nearly to the 40,000 required for statehood, Olson said in an article he co-authored for the Journal of Earth Science and Engineering.

This is interesting history given Illinois’ later connection to Abraham Lincoln and fighting slavery as well as the rapid spread of the Republican Party and its abolitionist priorities when the party was first founded in Wisconsin in the 1850s.

It might even be more intriguing to see how Pope and others thought about the southwestern edge of Lake Michigan. This was not the only point by which people and supplies could be transferred between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Indeed, it was not until several treaties, including a few after statehood (see the Treaty of Chicago), and the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (begun in the 1830s and completed in the late 1840s) that Chicago became a candidate for explosive growth. (And grow it did and quickly encompassed an entire region including significant portions of Wisconsin – see Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis).

Many top-cited papers initially rejected by good journals

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A new study finds that top-cited scientific studies are often rejected, sometimes without even going out for peer review:

Using subsequent citations as a proxy for quality, the team found that the journals were good at weeding out dross and publishing solid research. But they failed — quite spectacularly — to pick up the papers that went to on to garner the most citations.

“The shocking thing to me was that the top 14 papers had all been rejected, one of them twice,” says Kyle Siler, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who led the study. The work was published on 22 December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

But the team also found that 772 of the manuscripts were ‘desk rejected’ by at least one of the journals — meaning they were not even sent out for peer review — and that 12 out of the 15 most-cited papers suffered this fate. “This raises the question: are they scared of unconventional research?” says Siler. Given the time and resources involved in peer review, he suggests, top journals that accept just a small percentage of the papers they receive can afford to be risk averse.

“The market dynamics that are at work right now tend to a certain blandness,” agrees Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose book How Professors Think explores how academics assess the quality of others’ work. “And although editors may be well informed about who to turn to for reviews, they don’t necessarily have a good nose for what is truly creative.”

The gatekeepers seem to be exercising their power. Academic disciplines usually have clear boundaries about what is good or bad research and the journals help to draw these lines.

An alternative explanation: the rejections authors receive help them shape their studies in productive ways which then makes them more likely to be accepted by later journals. If this could be true, you need to expand the methodology of this study to look at the whole process. How do authors respond to the rejection and then what happens in the next steps in the publishing cycle?

On the hidden or out of the way yet sometimes thriving web forums

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This is something I have noticed recently in several sites I visit frequently: there is a little community of consistent posters who have been drawn together and slowly get to know each other. While one of these sites, the Ask Amy column posted on the site of the Chicago Tribune, is not exactly hidden, The Economist discusses some web groups that have formed in really hard to find or unlikely places:

The programming crew had accidentally created a community of the sort that crop up all over the internet. Most online discussions take place in discussion forums designed to allow people to create an identity and interact in threaded, chronological conversations. But the hidden recesses of the web provide enough soil to root entire worlds, too. Wherever one person may post words which more than one other may read and respond to, a world is born.

Read the article to hear how devoted fans of Douglas Adams founded a group in a forum that was an afterthought and how some people unhappy with Sonic Drive-In’s service found each other.

Sounds like a start to a very interesting research study: what exactly motivates people to (1) seek out these spaces and (2) then continue with discussions and getting to know each other. The description of what happens in these settings in out of way parts of the Internet is hilarious:

It’s been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It’s somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.

I would guess that the people who participate in groups like this are a limited number of total web users. I wouldn’t tend to be drawn to such forums: read a comment section of any blog or news story and you would likely find the conversation to be quite tedious or inflammatory. But I can remember the heady early days of AOL when chat rooms were the exciting feature of the Internet (and content took forever to load).

And these groups can be like real-life groups, meaning that they become territorial and protective:

Another surprise is that they will treat growth as a perturbation as well, and they will spontaneously erect barriers to that growth if they feel threatened by it. They will flame and troll and otherwise make it difficult for potential new members to join, and they will invent in-jokes and jargon that makes the conversation unintelligible to outsiders, as a way of raising the bar for membership.

It sounds like there is a starting period when the group might be somewhat fluid as people stumble unto such forums. But once the group coalesces and becomes a collective entity, others are not welcome and sharp boundaries are drawn to limit the influence of outsiders. So if one wants to become part of such a group, does one simply have to be lucky or have good timing?

Another question: what do the users get out of participating in such long digressions?