Please Make Yourself (un)Comfortable - Chapter One

Chapter One - “More for Less”

The closing of Honest Ed’s felt like the end of an era. Located in Toronto, Canada, at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, Honest Ed’s seemed, at first glance, like any emporium you might have encountered in a large city in North America. It had the requisite staff yelling across the floor in languages you often did not understand. Large boxes of paper towels being ripped open by strong-armed, no-nonsense, middle-aged Polish or Italian women.

Inquiries about “where exactly” one might find the cat food or unwaxed dental floss could have you confronting a seemingly loaded response: one index finger raised, accompanied by an exasperated sigh, pointing in the direction you would shortly go—somehow feeling like a shambling muttonhead as you approached the multicolored sign listing, unbelievably, cat food and unwaxed dental floss. Or maybe staff would provide a monotone “upstairs” without eye contact before continuing on to their conspicuously more important destination.

Honest Ed’s, where you got “More for Less! 

To be clear, Honest Ed’s did not specialize in customer service. That was never the brag. But in all directions, you could find shiny stacked cans of hot dog wieners or tuna; plastic vases; large clear packages of toilet paper rolls; screwdrivers; Hamburger Helper; maybe Kraft Dinner. It was all there, folks, and you could probably get three for the price of just one.

Yes.

Honest Ed’s had a mantra. If it was not, on some level, “Get out of my face,” then it was “More for Less.” This made it a sanctuary not just for the thick-skinned and street-smart, but also for the thrifty and penurious. If you were down and out, it was your place. The truth was: you could not go much lower. Here, your pennies went the distance, and for those who had hit hard times, it might have saved you—just as it saved me.

Yes. You really did get more for less, just as it promised. And as you filled your basket, you were distracted, perhaps from your quotidian concerns or the tedium of your day. Though the staff would not coddle you—or maybe even see you—you often left in a better mood.

Because Honest Ed’s was also different from those other emporiums, and you knew it right from the outset. First of all, it did not look like an emporium. In fact, it resembled a poor man’s Willy Wonka amusement park or at least suggested another world and time. Perhaps it was your childhood, or the one you imagined someone else had had somewhere.

Also, a business establishment that uses the word “Honest” in its name is either making up for some suspicious deficit or attempting, I would argue, to perform a little self-deprecation. However, this was considerably undone by the enormous sign announcing the establishment on the outside of the building. This sign was seventy-five feet long and twenty-three feet high.

And the lettering was simply gigantic.

But there was more: it was surrounded by 23,000 seemingly never-silent flickering light bulbs that made you feel dizzy when you looked at it too long, as though you might have had too much cotton candy, or had somehow found yourself on the seedier edge of Las Vegas.

No. All of this undid any self-deprecation that might have been suggested or half-heartedly attempted. The sign was monolithic. And though it was most certainly garish, with its forever-flickering tungsten bulbs, it was also positively iconic. More than that, front and center on this sign, spelled out in carnival reds and yellows, was the name of its founder: Edward Mirvish.

In truth, you were not visiting an emporium. You were visiting “Uncle Ed,” and he was promising you, indeed, a very good time.

According to the Ed Mirvish legend, Ed’s wet nurse was tenacity. He was born in a small town in the American South where nothing appeared to be working out. His father, David Mirvish, a poor immigrant from Lithuania, had run out of pivots. Hoping beyond hope to find better times, he selected Washington, D.C. and moved his family there.

Feel free to run that flickering black-and-white film reel as the Dixieland jazz music fades in.

For a while, things looked promising with his father’s corner grocery, but by 1923, this classic start-up unicorn was declared bankrupt. Once again, David gathered up his family and continued his exodus—even farther north this time—to the snowy streets of Toronto, where he resumed his struggle to earn a living, leaning into his personal charm and relying on his thick skin as a door-to-door salesman.

Traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood, David struggled to sell encyclopedias—of Freemasonry, of all things—and shoe brushes from the Fuller Brush Company. Ultimately, he gave this up and set his sights on yet another business: a grocery again, this time in the Ward district.

“The Ward” was a bustling landing place for new arrivals flowing in from Europe, China, the Caribbean, and Nova Scotia, filling tenement housing and cold-water walk-ups, searching for a chance at a better life, and creating its own small, thriving markets. It would serve as a crucible for young Ed’s business sense and sensibilities.

Like Father, Like Son

Ed’s early adult years would mirror his dad’s professional life. After starting in dry cleaning with his friend Yale Simpson, Ed made his own pivot, this time into ladies’ wear. But this venture, too, was temporary. It was at this moment in his life that he got his great “big idea.”

In time, this idea would come to change not only his destiny but the destinies of many.

Following the Second World War, yet more immigrants were leaving their war-ravaged towns and villages in economically compromised Europe for a second chance in North America. Sensing an opportunity like never before, Ed and Anne cashed in her life insurance policy and opened up a store they would call, simply, Honest Ed’s.

But rather than take the natural and intuitive step up from ladies’ wear, Ed saw opportunity where few did and took the stairs straight down—to the basement. Instead of riding the growing prosperity of Canada’s strong postwar economy, Ed chose to ease the transition for poor and newly arrived Europeans to “the big city” with a “no credit, no service” and “no frills” business strategy, selling merchandise he had purchased from none other than fire and bankruptcy sales.

And it was at this moment that he demonstrated his nascent visual flair by placing all merchandise in distinctly hideous, yet difficult-to-forget, orange crates. One wonders if his former competitors in the burgeoning ladies’ wear market suspected Ed had lost his mind.

Genius

This is where we are reminded that, in business, sometimes the exact opposite impulse is the best choice. You see, Honest Ed’s emporium did not, in fact, find its feet ever so gradually. It was not some dark horse that, with significant marketing, self-reflection, clever talk, and revisionist history, revealed itself to be brilliant.

No.

Honest Ed’s was an immediate success! In fact, within a very short time, the young and honest Edward Mirvish could loudly boast to the world that his Honest Ed’s was, indeed, “The World’s Biggest Discount Department Store.”

Hard times had come to an end for the growing Mirvish family. Honest Ed’s emporium soon generated millions a year—and continued to turn a profit for decades.

Over the years, Ed Mirvish would entertain the world while also giving back. He drew impatient lines of people around the block for the tens of thousands of free turkeys he gave away each Thanksgiving. There were his famous Pink Elephant Sales, staged each year with an actual elephant in his parking lot painted bright pink. And, on the occasion of his 92nd birthday, absolutely everything in the store was available for 92 cents. What’s not to love?

Genius.

From the very beginning and until the end, there was nothing bashful or understated about Ed Mirvish.

With all this said, though he was a singular showman, Ed Mirvish remained very much a regular guy. Yes. He would come to transform the arts and theater scene in Toronto and abroad. This son of a poor immigrant from Lithuania would leave his indelible mark with the artists’ sanctuary Mirvish Village, Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre, the Princess of Wales Theatre, and the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, introducing landmark productions like The Phantom of the Opera. Yes. He would come to receive numerous distinctions throughout his long life, including appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Still, despite it all, Ed Mirvish continued to have a simple, working-class lunch in the coffee shop of his emporium, visible beneath his famously gigantic Honest Ed’s sign. If you lived in or visited Toronto, Canada, during the Ed Mirvish decades, you may have walked past him and not even noticed. He was there each day, year after year, running his business until he left us in 2007.

Gone—But Not Forgotten

The face of Bloor and Bathurst, where his genius first emerged and where it thrived, now has a different, chic expression. The great emporium, Honest Ed’s, is gone.

On July 16, 2013, the entire site was surrendered to the demands of the modern real estate world and gave itself up for one hundred million dollars. The sign with its 23,000 spirited tungsten bulbs was put to bed. The store was turned to rubble. A towering mixed-use development would eventually replace it.

Still, if you were able to cross over the threshold of Honest Ed’s once more—passing beneath those thousands of clicking, flickering lights and that expansive red and yellow sign—if you found yourself within its interior, you would be under no illusion concerning whose house you were in.

Stretching across an entire city block on one of Toronto’s biggest downtown streets, Honest Ed’s surrounded its tables and stacks of merchandise with colorful, hand-painted signs—now selling online for hundreds of dollars—that shouted out the deals you just might miss and reminded you exactly where you were.

“Come on in and get lost!” was one of the first you would encounter.

If you were in doubt about an item, there was a sign for that:

“You CANNOT do without this!”

Or: “Every home needs this!”

But the message was clear and always right there in front of you, no matter how it was said.

“Honest Ed has holes in his sox! But his bargains are ‘darned’ good!”

Or: “Honest Ed is for the birds! Cheap, Cheap, Cheap!”

The message was eternally:                                                      

More for Less.

And there was… more.

Much more.

There were the larger-than-life, full-body, black-and-white photos of famous actors, musicians, and show-business personalities—Frank Sinatra, Liberace, Lauren Bacall, Jimmy Durante, Céline Dion, and countless others—lining the walls. Looking out from their private universes, they seemed to follow you up the stairs—all the way up to the dented cans table on the second floor.

And the ubiquitous fluorescent lighting never diminished.

Indeed, it was a fun house, a history lesson in popular culture, and a crash course in overstimulation. 

It was a Willy Wonka temple of gaudiness. A necessity for some; a secret guilty pleasure for others.

But as you crammed that embarrassing, easy-to-recognize Honest Ed’s bag—containing your Hamburger Helper, tins of sardines, and vacuum filters—into an old university knapsack, you might be excused if you felt some superiority mixed with all that distraction. You see, you probably failed to register the most important takeaway in the moments leading up to your exit.

Most people did.

It was all a sleight of hand, of course. Ed Mirvish had laid it out right there before you. But in doing so, in his clever way, he had made it invisible.

Only now, many years later, as I write these words, do I realize: the “It” was, in fact, one of the Great Secrets of Life.

And Ed Mirvish, the loud and gaudy protagonist of his very own rags-to-riches opera, was the real distraction.

The hand waving in front of the trick.

And that Great Secret of Life?

He had somehow figured it out.

The only way to really understand the enormity of what you missed is to rewind that reel and place your observations in a larger context. And I do not mean geographically—to Washington or Virginia—or even just to the early 20th century.

There is a much larger reel here.

To understand the uncanny genius of Ed Mirvish and what he understood, we need to rewind that reel all the way back roughly two billion years, to the early stirrings of complex life.

Only then can we begin to understand.

But before we do, we will need to make a quick stopover in Russia, two centuries before our present moment.

Trust me. It will help avoid the jet lag.

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Alistair A. Vogan is a researcher, writer, educator, and transdisciplinary thinker whose work explores the strange, funny, and often uncomfortable systems shaping human behaviour, technology, learning, and culture. His forthcoming nonfiction book, Please Make Yourself (Un)comfortable: The Rogue Scientist’s Field Guide, blends narrative, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, and humour to examine how life’s drive to get “more for less” shapes everything from cells and consciousness to cities, innovation, and the beautiful absurdities of modern life.

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