Reading incomprehension

Apparently 7-Eleven Corporation worries that its foreign ownership will impair its public image among Americans, according to unhappyfranchisee, a website that monitors franchises. I had to laugh.

The corporation is Japanese-owned, but here it promotes its national corporate headquarters in Texas. Now, given a choice between Japanese ownership and Texan, any New Yorker would choose Japan over Texas, unhesitatingly. New Yorkers, cosmopolitan to the core, all seem to partake of some Nipponophilia. We admire Japanese art, respect its religion, envy its corporate management style and we can't seem to get enough of its cuisine. Texas, with its gun culture, executions, religious fundamentalism, its flag-waving, anti-Darwinist textbook industry, its wealth, growth and political influence, inspires us with something between dread and terror. We even deplore its unhealthy cuisine. Texas is the anti-New York. Texas art?

It's a measure of just how distant 7-Eleven is from New York that it plays down its Japanese ownership. Not that it matters: even if it promoted itself as an efficient, streamlined, innovative minimalist Zen-like Japanese import, it wouldn't make their corporate packaged foodstuffs more palatable.