Place: PF Chang's
Lunch: Kung Pao scallops, fried rice, egg drop soup, Coke
PF Chang's has a lunch menu? Who knew. You get a small portion entree with your choice of rice and soup or salad. The egg drop soup was bland until I thought to put some of that sauce they make at your table in it to give it a kick. That totally worked.
I was seriously craving Taco Casa yesterday. But Taco Casa is in Texas, so I figured I'd go to Abelardo's after work. But I was ALSO going to go to Aldi after work, and the Abelardo's near Aldi hasn't opened yet. (It's opening next week.) So I ended up at Tasty Tacos, which did nothing to satisfy my craving for Taco Casa. But it did mean I had to drive down one of the local "auto miles" along the way. That took me by our new Fiat dealership which...is no longer a Fiat dealership. It's now a Buick-GMC dealership.
That was fast.
So I checked the news and found out the company Fiat begged to open a franchise here (their first in this market) was later begged by GM to open a GMC-Buick dealership on this side of town. So they did, and they moved Fiat into another old car dealership building that happened to be for sale.
The original short-lived Fiat dealership was housed in a really old building that's been the home of many car makes over the years and has never been remodeled. It's kind of cool in that way. It sat abandoned for a long time after its last tenant, Mitsubishi, moved into a new facility. But it was going to get a major overhaul for Fiat (and will anyway for GM. I should go photograph it before they get around to that.)
The "new" Fiat dealership used to be a Hyundai dealership. Hyundai moved into the neighboring building that used to be a Honda dealership after Honda moved into the neighboring building on the other side that used to be...wait for it...the GMC dealership.
The GMC franchise was lost to the guys who had the Pontiac and Buick dealerships in two buildings about halfway between the old GMC dealership and what's now going to be the new Buick-GMC dealership. They consolidated all three brands under one roof for a year before GM killed the Pontiac brand, begged the government for loads of money, and shed a bunch of dealerships...including the newly consoldated Pontiac-GMC-Buick dealership.
Said dealership appealed the decision and for an entire model year kept up the facade they were still a dealership when they weren't. They had no new cars to sell at all.
But they won their appeal, and became an official dealership again for the next model year. And when that model year ended, they decided they no longer wanted to be a Buick-GMC dealership and dropped the franchise in favor of being a used car supercenter.
And now the old building just up the street that had sat long abandoned before Fiat showed up is selling Buick and GMC. That's gotta bunch their panties even more than the fact that Carmax, one of the nation's major used car supercenters, just opened up nearby. They could have just SOLD their GMC-Buick dealership to these guys instead of abandoning the franchise.
Jeepers.
I should've gone to Texas. I can't handle all this drama.
