CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The Lotus Festival (photo above) is an annual celebration of the Asian cultures that have settled and flourished in Los Angeles. There will be dragon boat races and food, dance performances, a health fair, and community interest booths. The Lotus Festival is being held this weekend, July 9-10 at Echo Park.
The festivities begin at noon each day and continue until 9 PM. There will be 14 food booths, 29 boutique booths (that's how the sponsor describes them), and 38 community organization booths. Entertainment begins at noon each day, and continues until the festival's closing time of 9 PM.
How, you may ask, do you manage to fit dragon boat races into the middle of Los Angeles? The answer is Echo Park Lake. This is also a clue for the answer to "Why is it the Lotus Festival?"
Back in the late 1800s, what is now Echo Park was empty land on the western edge of a much smaller but growing city of Los Angeles. Then came the lake. It was originally designed to be a reservoir, containing water diverted from the L.A. River. You can read the story in Nathan Masters' history. As Masters explains, the lake and its surroundings went through various phases, and were eventually made into what we now know as Echo Park.
Historians are unsure how the lotus plants began to populate the lake, but at some time in the 1920s, they began to flourish. There is an amusing story of how the lake's lotus population died off and was later reintroduced. The fun part is that the replacement plants came from cuttings that had been stolen from the lake nearly a decade earlier. You can read about it in Marisa Gerber's story in the L.A. Times. How many people can put lotus thief and honored conservationist on their resume? Randy McDonald can.
The Lotus Festival is well on its way to the half-century mark, although it went out of business for a short time and then came back in 2014.
Each year, a different country sponsors the Lotus Festival. This year, it is the Republic of Korea. To give you an idea of the breadth of what will be presented, artist Yongseob Kwon will be displaying his remarkable collection of paintings of the LA River as imagined in a future setting. And those of you who have been active in neighborhood councils may know members of the Korean Culture Center Inc, which supports the heritage of the Korean independence movement as it existed in Los Angeles a century ago.
Wear your sun screen and print out a street map.
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Dave Thomas would have been ashamed--Dave Thomas (photo right) was the guy you may remember from Wendy's commercials. He has since passed on, but he represented his company on television for more than a decade, mostly in the 1990s. The other night I went into the Wendys over in Carson and ordered a burger and a bowl of chili. The young man at the register asked me if I'd like onions and cheese on my chili.
You may already know where this is going. I said, "Sure." He took my money but when I reached for the receipt, he held onto it, telling me that it was used to fill my order. Only later did I notice that Wendy's had stuck a half-dollar charge for the cheese on my bill. I should point out that the cheese they put on wouldn't have filled a thimble, but that's not the point. The point is that the company dishonestly and dishonorably stuck a surcharge on my bill without warning or explanation. Considering that cheese and onions are an expected part of a bowl of chili unless the customer declines them, this wasn't right. It was as if they had stuck a surcharge on the bill for taking a packet of sugar to go with a cup of coffee.
If you were to have gone into that same restaurant with me that same night and looked at the menu, you would have seen the incriminating evidence. The menu board gave the prices for two sizes of chili, but nowhere did that menu say anything about charging extra for cheese. Like I said, Dave Thomas would have been ashamed of this kind of behavior. The young manager politely explained that the computer automatically adds the fifty cents to your bill if you agree to the offer of the added cheese.
There oughta be a law--There is upselling and then there is sleazy upselling. One morning I ordered some breakfast at the McDonalds here in San Pedro. The menu item explained that my breakfast came with a drink which could be orange juice or coffee, and when I asked for coffee, the sales lady said, "Medium?" I assumed that she was offering me a chance to have either the smaller coffee (medium) or the larger coffee, as in upsize that. If she had offered me a large coffee, I would have understood that there would be a surcharge.
So that morning in McDonalds, still looking at the printed price list and in answer to the question, I said, "Sure." That was another half-buck that a corporate computer stuck onto my bill in its own sneaky way. I guess I should be more careful about answering any question at a fast food place with "Sure."
The game in upselling seems to be that the advertised price isn't necessarily the real price, and if you agree to any change whatsoever, you deserve your fate. But how is the offer of that half-thimble worth of cheese -- which the customer would assume is something that comes with the order -- any different than the question of whether you want cream in your coffee? We've come to expect that we can have our coffee with cream or without cream for the same price. Restaurants don't ordinarily charge us for sugar or artificial sweetener. It's part of the deal, and the cheese should be too. Or the sales person should make it clear that it's an upsale and it will be costing you. Then you can say to yourself, "Wendy's doesn't provide the whole dish when I order chili, so maybe I should avoid the Wendy's experience."
Long ago, fast food places introduced the hard upsell by asking, "Will you be having fries with that?" It didn't take people long to figure out that fries weren't a free bonus, but cost extra. Eventually that question became the punch line to a lot of jokes, such as "What is the first thing a liberal arts major says in his new job?"
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
The Lotus Festival: A Celebration of Asian Food, Culture and … Flowers
