Flashback Monday: Once and Future Chain Goodness

Set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to the early 1990s, a tumultuous time in much of the world… except Reston, where the big news was the opening of a couple of midrise buildings in a field Reston Town Center. The most depressing design plans had been luckily avoided, but RTC apparently needed to convince a dubious populace that this New Urban Core was, in fact, the real sanitized thing. What better way to do so than run advertising listing all the exciting chain goodness awaiting intrepid urban explorers, who had to park their car in a giant surface parking lot upwards of several hundred feet away from said retail and dining opportunities?

We're honestly not sure what's more surprising -- the number of these intrepid chain-store pioneers that no longer call RTC home, or the number that still do, more than two decades later. Either way, there's no doubt that chain shopping is "the life," as the ad's tagline in the even-then-dated handwriting script in the lower right put it, the end.