Medio tutissimus ibis.
I used to see frozen yogurt stands every now and then. Mostly they were in malls or airports, and once in a while you’d see one hanging out on the side of the road, no big deal. They were pretty fun places to get dessert – you got to choose your own toppings and choose how much and what flavor yogurt to get, and it was always so good (unpopular opinion but I’m a big fan of the generic EuroTart flavor. Mix it in with some cookie dough and mmmmm)! Plus, a frozen yogurt shop was always a welcome shift away from the bland old ice cream parlor, as good as ice cream is.
Maybe two or three years ago, though, I started to notice that frozen yogurt shops were popping up everywhere. They went from something that you’d see fairly rarely to something that every shopping area had to have in order to survive. Every mall had one. Every strip center, downtown area, and grocery store complex had one. There were so many FroYos, GoYos, YoYos, PinkBerries, and RedBerries, that I stopped being able to keep track of them. Businesses were moving out and frozen yogurt was moving in. Everybody who was anybody got frozen yogurt with their friends on the weekend, and business boomed.
At first, I was in support of this. “Frozen yogurt is great!” I thought, “It’s the perfect combination between a coffee shop vibe and an ice cream store vibe, and I’m glad everybody likes it as much as I do!” Eventually, though, some line was crossed and my opinion totally changed. Maybe it was the mall near me that took out a CVS to install a frozen yogurt stand right next to another frozen yogurt stand, maybe it was the FroYo that tried too hard to make itself seem like a coffee shop for hipsters than a place to get frozen yogurt, maybe it was the fact that shopping centers started installing frozen yogurt places just in order to make themselves look “hip” and “forward.” Whatever it was, I started to have some very skeptical opinions about the dessert and the establishments that served it.
Look, I’m not saying that frozen yogurt stores are bad. I actually think they’re really neat, as long as they’re built on real estate that makes sense and with the fact in mind that all they are is a frozen yogurt store. They’re not coffee shops and they’re not ice cream parlors, and placing a frozen yogurt store where coffee or ice cream should go tends to just not feel right. Plus, the excessive prescription of frozen yogurt shops with the idea of making a shopping center appeal to young people and to make that shopping center look like it’s staying ahead of the curve can really just be nauseating. How many times have you walked through a mall and turned a corner and really really really just wanted a Ben and Jerry’s but instead found PinkBerry, a whopping three stores away from a YoGo? As soon as frozen yogurt starts being everywhere, it starts to become pretty unbearable, and just, honestly, kind of annoying.
So please, dear owners of shopping centers around the world, keep your frozen yogurt stands in check, for everybody’s sanity.
And that’s how I feel about semicolons.