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 for many. Located in Toronto, Canada, on the corner of Bloor and Bathurst Street, Honest Ed’s was, in many ways, like any emporium you might have encountered in any large city in North America. Staff yelling across the floor in languages you often did not understand. Large boxes of paper towels ripped open by a strong-armed and no-nonsense middle-aged Polish or Italian woman. Your questions about “where exactly” you might find the cat food or unwaxed dental floss could receive the seemingly loaded response of just one finger raised impatiently (and accompanied by exasperated sigh), pointing in the direction you’d shortly go—somehow feeling a little like a shambling muttonhead as you approached the multicolored sign listing—unbelievably—unwaxed dental floss and cat food. Or maybe they’d just give you a monotone “upstairs” without eye contact before they continued on to their destination.

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

To be clear, Honest Ed’s didn’t specialize in customer service. But in all directions, you’d find stacked cans of hot dog wieners, tuna, or plastic vases; large packages of toilet paper rolls that would shortly find the bathrooms where they’d end their days; or Hamburger Helper, maybe Kraft Dinner. It was all there, and you could probably get three for the price of just one.

Honest Ed’s had a mantra. If it wasn’t—on some level—“Get out of my face,” it was “More for Less.”  Honest Ed’s was a Mecca not just for the thick-skinned and street-smart, but the thrifty and extremely penurious. If you were down and out, it was your place. You couldn’t go much lower. At Honest Ed’s, your pennies went the distance, and for those who’d 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 didn’t coddle you—or maybe even see you!—you often left in a better mood.

But Honest Ed’s was also different from those other emporiums, and you knew it right from the onset. First of all, it didn’t 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, while a business establishment that uses the word “Honest” in its name suggests it is making up for some suspicious deficit, if it isn’t, then it suggests, I would argue, self-deprecation. However, this was undone considerably by the sign on the outside of that building, which was seventy-five feet long and twenty-three high, and the font, which was simply gigantic.

Also, that sign was surrounded with 23,000 seemingly never-silent flickering light bulbs that made you feel dizzy, as though you might have had too much cotton candy, or that you 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—almost dwarfing the efforts of cultures like Göbekli Tepe—and garish with its forever flickering tungsten bulbs, and positively iconic. And front and center of this sign, spelled out in carnival reds and yellows was the Christian name of its founder: Edward Mirvish.

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

According to Ed Mirvish’s official story, Ed Mirvish’s wet nurse was tenacity. Born in a small town in the American South where nothing appeared to be working out, Ed’s father, David, a poor immigrant from Lithuania, moved his family to Washington, D.C., hoping beyond hope to find better times. (Feel free to run that flickering black and white film reel with Dixieland jazz music fading 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 recommenced his exodus, even farther north this time, to the mean streets of Toronto where, well, he resumed his struggle to earn a living, this time applying his personal charm and thick skin as a door-to-door salesman.

Traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood, David somehow struggled to sell Encyclopedias (of Freemasonry of all things) and shoe brushes from the Fuller Brush Company. Ultimately, David gave this up and set himself on yet another business—a grocery again—this time in “the Ward” district.

“The Ward” was a bustling landing place for new immigrants flowing in from Europe, China, the Caribbean, and Nova Scotia, filling up tenement housing, 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. Starting in dry cleaning with his friend Yale Simpson, he would then make a pivot into ladies’ wear for a time with a dress shop he’d own with his young wife, Anne. And then he’d get his great “bright idea.” In time, this idea would change not just his destiny but those of many.

Following the Second World War, yet more immigrants were leaving their war-ravaged towns and villages in economically compromised Europe for that second chance in North America. Ed would cash in his wife’s life insurance policy and open up a store they would call, simply, Honest Ed’s.

Rather than take the natural and intuitive step up from ladies’ wear, seeing opportunity where few did, Ed took the stairs directly to the basement. Instead of riding the growing prosperity of Canada’s strong postwar economy Ed chose to ease the transition for the poor and newly arrived Europeans to the “big city” with a “no credit, no-service,” “no frills” business strategy, selling merchandise he’d purchased from nowhere 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 wasn’t some dark horse that, with significant marketing, self-reflection, clever talk, and revisionist history revealed itself to be brilliant. No. It was an immediate success! In fact, within a very short time, young and honest Edward Mirvish could loudly boast to the world that Honest Ed’s was “The World’s Biggest Discount Department Store.”

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

Over the years that would follow, Ed Mirvish would entertain the world (and give back as well), creating impatient lines of people around the block of his corner store empire for the tens of thousands of free turkeys he would give away each Thanksgiving; or his famous Pink Elephant Sales he inaugurated each year with an actual elephant in his parking lot painted bright pink, or brilliantly hiring angry picketers to protest Honest Ed’s dress code outside the coffee shop on the ground floor; or simply making absolutely everything in the store available for 92 cents on the occasion of his 92nd birthday.

Genius. 

From the very beginning and until the end, there was nothing bashful nor understated about Mr. Ed Mirvish. This might have been how he performed his greatest sleight of hand! (…something we’ll explore in theme throughout this work.)

With all this said, though a singular showman, Ed Mirvish remained very much a regular guy. Yes. He’d come to transform the arts and theatre scene in Toronto and abroad. This kid 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’d come to receive numerous distinctions throughout his long life, including Officer of the Order of Canada.

Despite all this, Ed Mirvish continued to have a simple, working-class lunch in the coffee shop of his emporium, visible beneath his absolutely gigantic Honest Ed sign—you may have walked past him and not even noticed. He was there each day over the years while he continued to run his business, until his death in 2007.

Gone—but not forgotten

The face of Bathurst and Bloor Street, where Edward Mirvish’s genius first showed itself and where it thrived, now has a different, chic expression. The great emporium, Honest Ed’s, is gone.

On July 16th, 2013, the entire site 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, and the store was turned to rubble. A towering mixed-use complex came to 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 an entire city block on one of Toronto’s biggest downtown streets, surrounding the tables and stacks of merchandise you’d see the colorful hand-painted signs—now selling on the internet for hundreds of dollars—shouting out the deals you just might miss and reminding you exactly where you were. “Come on in and get lost!” was one of the first you’d encounter. If you were in doubt about an item, there was a sign for that too, to clarify things: "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. Whether it was: “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. Larger-than-life black-and-white photos of formerly supple-skinned and wrinkle-free famous actors in their prime, who had once raised the pulses of audiences of Ed’s theatres, plastered the walls (and the stairwell too) all the way up to the second floor. All illuminated by wall-to-wall fluorescent lighting. Indeed, it was a fun house, a history lesson in Canadian theatre, a crash course in overstimulation.

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

As you crammed the easy-to-recognize Honest Ed’s bag containing your Hamburger Helper, tins of sardines, and vacuum filters into an old knapsack, you might be excused if you sensed a little superiority mixed with all that distraction. Because you probably missed the most important takeaway. In fact, Ed Mirvish had just used a sleight of hand that caused you to miss what had been right in front of you. Actually, right in front of you.

But you can’t go back in now. You missed it. You were too blind to see it.

Don’t worry. I think we all were. Only now, years later, as I write this, do I realize it. The “It” is, in fact, one of the Great Secrets of Life. And Ed Mirvish, descendant of a poor Lithuanian immigrant from the old film reel, 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 don’t mean geographically to Washington or Virginia—not even just to the early 20th century.

There is a much larger reel here.

To understand the uncanny genius of Ed Mirvish, we need to rewind that reel all the way back 2.1 billion years…

Only then can we begin to understand.

But before we do, let’s take a quick detour to Russia, two centuries before our present moment…