At long last, America’s Backbone is here.
Well, it’s closer than it was.
With great help from your submissions, we’ve compiled a list of 114 chains—mostly eateries, though there are some gas stations and grocers and at least one hardware store mixed in—which may or may not constitute the backbone of America.
We’re looking for that backbone.
We’re looking for the most loved among these 114.
We said we were looking for regional chains, and we quickly realized that was hard to define. It sounds so simple, you know? But then the question arises: Where to draw the line? In the end, we decided that as long as a chain was present in fewer than 35 states, it qualified as regional. We also realized that it’s important to have the whole country represented in here, even though our readership and therefore nomination base is disproportionately located in the Central Time Zone. For example: Illinois and Texas each have 36 of the 114 nominated chains somewhere in their state. Some of this is that the Central gets more chains, drawing from both coasts, but a lot of it is that I’ve lived roughly 80% of my life in Illinois and Texas, so 1) I nominated places I know and 2) we tend to blog about things somewhat associated with our locales. We adjusted for this by spending three hours online learning about favorite chains in all different corners of this country. It’s possible we’ve missed some, but this list is a testament to what three hours can and cannot accomplish.
As is often the case with these brackets, we’re polling you to help us determine which 64 chains must make the cut. We aren’t going to construct the bracket solely off your voting—we’re going to try to be somewhat regionally representative, so that people who don’t read the blog but stumble across the bracket think we’re a bigger deal than we are—but we’re going to heavily weigh your votes in our decision-making, especially when it comes to places with which we have no familiarity.
How will the voting work? Well, here’s the form. It’s a list of the 114 places we came up with. We are only trying to figure out which of those 114 places generate the most fanaticism, so we’re asking you to indicate: Do you love the place? Do you know someone who loves the place? We don’t care if you’re familiar with it or if you like it or tolerate it. We care if you or someone you know loves the establishment in question.
Leave as many blank as you want. Get your votes in before 7:00 PM EDT tomorrow, Tuesday July 11th. We’re aiming to have the bracket out on Wednesday morning, and we’re aiming to start voting on Thursday.
