Column: Don’t be blinded by the shiny lights of Franklin Street chains

Growing up, my mother made it very aware to me that food has expiration dates. Untouched milk will get sour and curdle; bananas will go from yellow to brown; tortilla chips will have a stale, muted crunch. I knew things expired. 

Arriving in Chapel Hill, I didn’t realize the small town favorites like Spanky's, Linda’s Bar & Grill and Schoolkids Records (though also in Raleigh) have expiration dates too.

Today, our reality as students and citizens in this area is that we walk, drive and bus on Franklin Street almost, if not every day. It's even where The Daily Tar Heel has our office. We're no longer surrounded by historic storefronts whose ambition was to provide a specific service to this community. Today, I stroll along and have to familiarize myself with new chains that add no dynamic experience to where I am. 

As people who walk Franklin frequently, I'd like to think we all know the businesses very well. 

Bandido's Mexican Grill is a friend of mine who's extroverted, playful and homey and is the birthplace for most of my closer relationships with friends on the Opinion Desk. Sutton's Drug Store is a place I feel like a kid again, using quarters to buy lollipops. It's also my confidant the morning after something eventful happened and my whole friend group has to arrive for our signature breakfast, where I'm not ashamed to be wearing my pajamas in the middle of town. The services and memories these businesses, and ones like it, have provided me made my experience whole. 

However, chains are slowly monopolizing the three mile stretch that makes up Franklin Street, as the price of a walkable business for Chapel Hill locals is too expensive. Franklin is almost unrecognizable for most alumni, and even since when I first arrived for my first-year orientation more than two years ago, multiple small businesses have vanished from their former spaces.

Toto, I don't think we're in Chapel Hill anymore.

Sure, I'm guilty of patiently, maybe even stupidly, waiting in a long line for Raising Cane's when it opened its doors, but this is not the core Chapel Hill experience. It's places like the always open Time-Out Restaurant located in a building that’s been an integral part of East Franklin Street since 1930.

Recently, I saw people excitedly await the opening of Playa Bowls. Fresh paint, a giant menu of bowls, and it didn't feel at all like something you could only get by being here, in Chapel Hill. 

With such competition and ideal real estate for foot traffic, it feels as though I need to be mourning the likely expiration of The Purple Bowl, a family business started by the Gillands in 2016. The invention of The Purple Bowl began after a family trip to California where they came back to Chapel Hill obsessed with the cold and rich flavors of acaí, which wasn’t served anywhere in the area. So, The Purple Bowl, originally situated at 306B W. Franklin St., became the community's sole source of acaí. This is the kind of business I feel pride to patron when doing my daily commute to and from campus — a real Chapel Hill business.

As students, though it can be tempting to be excited by the shiny new offerings of a chain business taking up a sought after space on Franklin Street, I seek to remind you it's the homegrown, niche businesses in this area that make up and influence our just-off-campus cultural hearth. As residents, we must put our support where our native businesses are. It's the only way we can do our part in keeping Chapel Hill novelties and classics, beloved by so many, unexpired.

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com