Can you buy a Snickers bar in uptown Charlotte after 5:30 p.m.?
That was the simple question at the heart of a memorable column Observer business writer Doug Smith penned two decades ago.
The idea came to him by way of urban planner Michael Gallis, who had a snack attack late one afternoon and had to walk 10 blocks along Tryon Street to locate one of the world’s best-known and most common consumer products – a Snickers candy bar.
The fact that he labored to find a simple Snickers bar after office hours seemed to crystallize a larger point about uptown Charlotte’s all-work, no-play atmosphere.
To become a true world-class city, Doug reasoned, Charlotte’s uptown must be more than an office park that turns ghost town after 5:30. It needs to be a place where people live, eat, shop and play around the clock.
The kind of place, in short, where finding a simple Snickers bar is no big deal.
With that in mind, Doug and Gallis in 1993 set out to see whether finding the candy bar was really as hard as Gallis thought.
The pair walked from the south end of Tryon
Article source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/02/15/4695260/20-years-later-can-we-find-a-snickers.html If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com
