Taking on Giants

Aris Mardirossian is my kind of mensch.

When the 7-11 convenience store chain canceled a contract for a franchise on property he owns in Gaithersburg, MD, the 35-year old Armenian immigrant (1965) started his own chain--dubbing it 6-Twelve. Needless to say down in Dallas the Southland Goliath was not amused by the slingshot humor of this upwardly mobile David.

Shortly after he signed the contract for a third 6-Twelve store, their attorney wrote the feisty entrepreneur on a roll that it was Southland's belief that Mardirossian's perkily parodic name "was adopted for the purpose of falsely suggesting some sort of affiliation with Southland's national 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores." Huffily, the Big S down in the Biggest D called upon this pipsqueak promoter "to terminate all usages of the expression 6-Twelve."

No way, Jose. Aris took up his trusty slingshot once more and fielded a series of full-page ads in suburban newspaper with an all out aggressive headline booming, "REASONS WHY 6-TWELVE IS BETTER THAN 7-ELEVEN." When the Armenian-American (he took out citizenship!) approached big time lawyers in Washington, New York and Boston for counsel in his suit with Southland, they advised him to cave in--no way he could ever win a tussle with such a giant. "I don't like to hear I can't do something," Ari recalled. "I remembered that MCI took on AT&T, so I called MCI's lawyers in Chicago, and they said we had a good case."

So the indomitable Armenian took on Southland, and with minor cosmetic changes of his testing logo, the kingpin of convenience stores did the caving in--even paying Ari an undisclosed amount for his pains. "No where else but in the U.S. could you go against the grain, take on a big company and win," exults Ari. "The whole story of America is the spirit of competition, the spirit of determination, the spirit of fairness." And his first two stores are winners: each grosses $1.5 to 2 million a year, with a profit margin of 9 to 10 percent. Now Ari dreams of taking on Southland all across his newly adopted country: he's been getting about twenty calls a month from interested franchises.

Are his stores really better? Check it out the next time you pass through Gaithersburg. It's easy to find--right across the street from, ahem, a 7-Eleven! He and his co-owning brother contend they serve better food than they do, have a faster checkout (computer scanners!), and have a wider selection of food. The mechanical engineer (a master's from the University of Maryland) is a dropout from Potomac Electric Power Co. and got his retail feet wet owning a restaurant.

He has a weird personnel training policy. Ari marches new employees through 7-Eleven across the street, insisting after their disorientation tour: "We don't want to be like this. We want to be better." (Carl Horwitz, Inquirer, June 26, 1986, 13D.) He wants them to be cleaner, bigger, more community-oriented, and less expensive than the Southland clones. It's the Armenian-American way. The puckish wit scheduled the opening of a third 6-Twelve (in Olney, east of Gaithersburg) for July 11 (get it? 7/11!).

Which reminds me how pitiful and counterproductive a countervailing trend in major American cities is at the moment. I mean the efforts to "discipline" street vendors, allegedly because they create a public nuisance of themselves, getting in the way of the affluent consumers who want unimpeded access to the big department stores. If they're not paying their sales tax, or vendors fees, that's one thing.

But it's on the edge of absurd trying to suppress this tradition of peddlers a century after the Statue of Liberty was lighting their ways to the best street corner locations. Scratch any third generation department store scion and you'll find a peddler or two hanging in that family's tree! Starting from scratch is what made this country relatively free of graft.

It has befallen no less an institution than the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital to bring this sweep our street clean mentality to the edge of the absurd. Any sunny working day the TJUH is benignly encircled with fast food vendors, catering for the most part to the institution's own workers.

Lately, the hospital's brass has been muscling City Council to outlaw the freely enterprising caterers on the grounds that the elderly wealthy sick find the gauntlet of hot dogs intimidating, and in the growingly competitive market for your unpoor, overtired and definitely unhuddled masses of fee-paying ill, a hospital has to watch out for its bottom lines. Or at least paying customers trying to get through them.

Come on fellas. Such an exclusionary policy might be appropriate at a John D. Rockefeller Hospital or and Imelda Marcos Podiatry Clinic, but Thomas Jefferson?? You ought to be ashamed. And you ought to cheer on the next Fourth of July for the Aris Mardirossians of this immigrant ridden country who bring their tremendous energy, their considerable gall, and their unrestricted understanding of their adopted country's traditions to their making it in America. "When you get me mad," Aris warns, "I get competitive."

Amen. Let Aris have the last word. "The challenge of making money is what drives me." Heh, in America, any boy and girl can grow up to be a millionaire peddler. Aris, we needed that reminder! And Southland, please go to the blackboard and write this message to your corporate selves: "I will not lose my sense of humor." 100 times, please. For Lady Liberty.