Still miss Dairy Queen, which came, briefly sold its products, and left.
Guy
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Oops. I guess I can stop vaguely intending to try out that Tianmu branch then.
Google says permanently closed.
Looks like it was way back - I don’t remember them being here. Even the forumosa archive isn’t very helpful! All I can find is this post from January 2009:
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Yup. Which is why I can stop vaguely intending to go there. As usual, I’ve got that weird time compression thing going on, where if someone told me they closed seven years ago, I’d be surprised, but anywhere between one and five years would sound about right.
Huh, apparently I don’t get into Tianmu all that often anymore either.
Our own thread about the Dairy Queen grand opening was last updated in August 2014.
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Yeah, I know. I just never heard of Cinnabon being here. I’m still in mourning over the departure of Dunkin’ Donuts.
Auntie Anna’s pretzels are in Hsinchu. Seems popular when first open. Now it’s a ghost town.
We don’t have to even intend to go there. We have ekselence.
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The couple times I’ve eaten them (in the far far away kingdom) they were really tasty, but expensive as hell. That might have something to do with the ghost town effect.
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Yeah, but Ekselence is too recent to have affected any visits to Dairy Queen. It could be that Ben & Jerry’s is more than sufficient for the ice cream fix (that’s certainly why I haven’t gone to Coldstone in ages). There’s also the one Dairy Queen visit I’ve had in the past five years, for a Blizzard in Canada (2019? 2018?), and how incredibly disappointing it was. That’s probably the main reason I never quite made it to Dairy Queen here.
Typically, brands like those don’t stay. Not enough foreign customers to tide over the lull after the initial flurry of local interest. Not enough investment to make it work long enough to be successful. And most products that do survive become differentiated from their home brand due to local influence, product dilution, or cost substitution. Case in point is Mr.Donut which was originally a Dunkin’ donuts affiliate.
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Would you happen to know what caused them to leave? Also what year were they in Taiwan? I thought most Taiwanese quite like ice cream so I’d be quite surprised if it didn’t do well.
Carrefour left lots of places the last two decades. (Just google the statement.)
‘For the longest time, French-based retail giant Carrefour made a good poster child for internationalization. With a presence in twice as many countries as British competitor Tesco, its expansion into foreign markets has been broader in scope and faster in speed than any other global retailer’s. Carrefour was one of the first grocers who saw opportunity in Southeast Asia where it entered in the 1990s. At the same time, its failures also came at a much grander scale. Carrefour pulled out of the USA as early as 1994; it left Mexico in 1995; Hong Kong in 2000; the Czech Republic and Japan in 2005; South Korea in 2006; Portugal and Switzerland in 2007; Russia in 2009; Colombia and Thailand in 2010; Greece, Malaysia and Singapore in 2012. In recent years, it has also been considering its units in China, Indonesia, Poland, Taiwan, Turkey, and other markets for divestiture. It almost looks like Carrefour has been undergoing a shift in strategy, and entered a great period of de-internationalization’
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I still can’t get over the name…
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I only want Popeyes. Couldn’t care less about the other ones.
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Popeyes and El Pollo Loco for me. I’ll get my Popeyes fix in Ho Chi Minh in January 
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You can see the thread I already linked to above - they opened here in December 2013.
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Spray paint it ‘For Fuck Sakes Mia C’Mon! The Pubs are Closing!’
I once passed by a wee newsagents/paper shop and spotted that the news stand looked disordered. It had a magnet saying ‘Free’ at the top and another with ‘for every reader’. Unfortunately, the newsagent had written ‘Sexual Assault’ as the single piece of news on their board.
I decided to bring all the elements together so it read, ‘Free Sexual Assault for Every Reader!’.
Glad I didn’t get my ass handed to me for it.
The Mia C’bon here in Taoyuan added a self checkout feature a few months ago that I really like.
The confusing part is that they don’t have bags available at the self checkout (I try to bring my own but it doesn’t always work out that way). So you end up standing in line at the regular check out just to get a bag that you can bring over to the “faster” self check out 
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