Post #264832 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Nov 6, 2006 12:13 PM

On 2006-11-06 11:53, Humuhumu wrote: Do you think it's possible that these were ordered out of Asia in the '60s?

Frankly, no. If I compare them to the Tikis at the London, Munich, or Atlanta T.V.'s locations, all built in the 1970s, they don't look anything like it. I have to correct my earlier statement about the Barney West Tikis only being em/deployed til the 60s:

Now that I think about it, all of the above locations, and even the Hamburg one, built in the late 80s, have some Barney West Tikis in them. I am talking about the freestanding ones, not the Tiki posts and railings. At that point, Trader Vic's was still storing their decor from closed locations, re-using it in newly opened places, shipping whole containers of it over the Atlantic.

When, in the course of my BOT research, in the mid-90s I got to see the old Trader Vic's warehouse in Oakland (since then closed, NOT the same as the above mentioned importer, who now does have some of the old Tiki columns), I was very disappointed:

NO large Tikis were left at all! Somehow, for some reason, it seems that beginning in the 90s, when franchises like Portland and Washington DC closed, T.V.'s did not bother about restocking their decor and just let it go.

So with the slew of new locations opening in this decade, they had to come up with an economic solution, it's a business after all. The Trader would have agreed, he was sort of the Walt Disney of Tiki, a visionary businessman. Problem nowadays is, there are only businessmen left, the visionary part fell by the wayside somehow.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2006-11-06 12:22 ]