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 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 an exasperated sigh), pointing in the direction you’d shortly go—somehow feeling 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 more important destination.

Honest Ed’s, where you got “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,” then it was “More for Less.” Honest Ed’s was a Mecca 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. 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 by 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 it was most certainly garish, with its forever-flickering tungsten bulbs, but also positively iconic. More than that, 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 the Ed Mirvish legend, Ed’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 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 somehow 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 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 then made 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 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 his wife would cash in his wife’s life insurance policy and open 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’d 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 wasn’t 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, as Ray Charles once sang, 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 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 gave 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.

But, 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 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 over the years while he ran his business, until his death in 2007.

Gone—but not forgotten

The face of Bathurst and Bloor Street, where his 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.

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

Don’t worry. I think we all were. Only now, many years later, as I write this down, do I realize: the “It” is, in fact, one of the Great Secrets of Life. And Ed Mirvish, the loud protagonist of his very own rags-to-riches story, 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 roughly 2 billion years, for the early stirrings of complex life…

Only then can we begin to understand.

But before we do, we’ll need to make a quick stopover in Russia, two centuries before our present moment… Trust me. It’ll 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, 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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