What's in a Name?

It's only the losers named Dave that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think. They're named Dave.

Penn Gillette

If you’ve ever spent time as a leasing agent, you know most of your time is spent separating prospects from morons. And shopping centers are fertile soil for morons. The big leasing signs mounted on plywood in front of strip malls are nothing more than billboards announcing the equivalent of “For a Good Time Call ______”.

The problem is sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - there’s a nugget in the stack of phone messages. So we return the calls, tedious as it may be.

Return calls fall into these categories:

1. “Who dis?”

2. “How much is the rent?” Then a shellacking about why it’s too high (from someone who doesn’t operate a store).

3. “My wife and I were thinking of opening a store - what kind of store do you think we should open?”

In the mid 1990’s I was the leasing agent for a goofy shopping center outside of Orlando. It was in a swell part of town but had an odd configuration and at one end where one might expect an anchor store was a big, vacant, rusted metal building with a cantilevered awning on one side. I was told it used to be a lumber yard.

The property sat on a busy road in a moneyed area so the phone rang non-stop. One return call, however, landed outside of responses 1-3 above. The caller would be arriving next week from Texas and was interested in the lumber yard space.

This was the pre-mobile phone era when waiting around was less entertaining, and I killed time by throwing pebbles in the parking lot. My prospect/victim arrived by rental car. He had a pony tail and his hairy toes crept out of his Birkenstocks.

We walked through and around the building a few times, with me a few steps behind. He took photos with a disposable camera, the cardboard kind, and asked a lot of questions. I could tell he liked the building.

Finally he asked about the rent and I told him a number that I knew was far more than the owners would take. With his hands on his hips, he nodded and said “I’ll take it”.

Better find out what he wants it for, I thought, knowing the owner would pepper me with questions.

“So tell me about your company”, I asked.

He told me it was a grocery store. They called it “Whole Foods”.

What a dumb name - like whole instead of half? I remember thinking. I asked all the questions I could think of and jotted his answers on one of the index cards I always carried back then.

The owner didn’t care about the dumb name and was thrilled with the proposed rent - and was even more giddy they didn’t want him to pay for any improvements. I called the Birkenstock man and told him the owner would consider the offer but only if we got a lease signed quick.

“OK”, Birkenstock man said, “just send me a lease and make it fair.”

I had our standard lease prepared, a quarter-inch thick, protecting the landlord for every possible contingency that might occur over the next 20 years of lease term, and steeled myself for a lengthy negotiation. A week later signed copies arrived in the mail, with no changes whatsoever.

These days that quarter-inch lease would be half an inch thick and a lease negotiation would require at least a year of gradual yet thorough bloodletting.

Modern company names at first sound ridiculous until a barrage of advertising sandblasts our brain and we accept them as second nature. Old Navy, Fuddrucker’s, Five Below, Jack in the Box, Panda Express, Little Caesars - all are preposterous, when you think about it. Long gone are the days of sensible and muscular names like General Motors, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, or American Can.

A few months after making the deal with Whole Foods, I met a couple of guys interested in opening a restaurant, their third. They handed me business cards and, glancing at the logo, thought a kangaroo meat restaurant sounded disgusting - but whatever.

Outback, they called it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in real estate.

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