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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> The article doesn't mention it, but am I right in assuming this basically comes from McDonald's? There are a lot of places around the world that copy the "'s" where it doesn't exist natively, but only for restaurant names or similar -- like "Bob's" is the McDonald's clone in Brazil [1].

For whatever reason, it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's". I've had conversations about it multiple times with different people in my family. There's no one named "Uno", it's a number! I try not to be a prescriptivist but for whatever reason this bothers me to an irrational degree, and I can't understand why nobody else notices.

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This sounds very Midwestern to me. Where I come from that would happen a lot. It wasn't necessarily that people didn't know the real name of the place. It functioned more like an inflection that helps to distinguish between the company, and a specific storefront operated by that company. Compare it to the distinction between "Alice" and "Alice's". Alice is the person, and Alice's is her house.

For example, you you'd say "JCPenney stock is up by 32 cents this week," but you'd also say, "I bought this shirt at Penney's."

My family is all from either New England or New York, so it might not just be a Midwestern thing anymore!

I've got ten bucks that says you've shopped for groceries at "Jewels"

That in turn sounds a lot like the latin locative case [1], which was a case next to dative, accusative etc. to indicate place.

[1] https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program...

Is this not restricted to company names deriving from personal names (or words that are perceived as such), though? For example, would you say “I bought this shirt at Target’s”?

In general, yeah, but this is sneaking into the area of language where it's all ad-hoc conventions and there aren't actually any reliable rules. I suspect, for example, that there's a sandhi component that helps predict which store names do and do not get the S added.

People call Safeway "Safeway's" all the time. This one kinda drives me crazy.

Fred Meyer is also not "Fred Meyer's" but at least I can see why that would happen.

Then you have Vons, which used to be "Von's Grocery Company." I guess you go in there now and there's just more than one guy named Von in the store.

Ralphs also dropped the apostrophe.

Albertson's is now "Albertsons."

Kinda funny it seems like Americans are dropping the apostrophes. The exact opposite of what the article is talking about.

At least nobody is saying "Let's go to Costco's."

Also in the PNW, everybody called it "Penny's" for as long as I can remember.

I’m definitely saying “Costco’s” from now on; that’s hilarious to me.

I come from Michigan, and have found that the two fastest ways people identify me are 1) calling fizzy soft drinks "pop" and 2) that I add an "s", e.g. King Sooper's or Meijer's.

The establishments are owned by a corporate person named "Uno Restaurant Holdings Corporation".

So calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website, for example.

> calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores calling it Uno's isn't inconsistent with how we talk about Walmart's stores or Google's website

No, calling it "Uno Corp's pizzeria" would be the equivalent. Nobody says they're "Going down to Walmart's" or "doing some research on Google's."

My grandmother would indeed refer to shopping at “WalMart’s” or “Penney’s”. Maybe a regional thing (she was from central PA)?

Same in Iowa. I grew up talking about going to Penny's (as in JC Penny) or Sernett's or Gibson's (local department stores).

Midwesterner here.

My family always used "Penny's" to refer to JC Penny. They also continued to refer to Macy's as Dayton's for years after they had changed their name because the locations were all the same, just the name had changed.

Its funny because I too always felt saying "Penny's" was a regional thing, but more of Midwestern thing.

I'm from northern Ohio (Cleveland area) and it's only reading this thread that I'm learning/realizing that the name "JCPenny" isn't plural or possessive. My family always called it "Penny's" too.

The Australian English thing to do is to drop the apostrophe, use an optional creative contraction to make the phrase even shorter, and thereby turn the entire thing into a noun :)

I.e. Maccas vs McDonald's

Of course, the official website https://mcdonalds.com.au/about-maccas/maccas-story uses an apostrophe which is now making me have the same reaction as the Germans :( and makes me think it was run through some international filter :p outrageous!

I've also heard people saying "Aldi's" in the US.

The stores really were called Penneys (no idiot apostrophe present) until being gradually rebranded in the 70s and 80s.

some examples:

80s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Seattle_Pen...

70s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FW_Woolworth,_Penney...

60s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penneys,_Eastland_Ma...

50s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_46896_...

40s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seattle_-_Second_Ave...

Penney's was founded by James Cash Penney. The store was his store, that is, it was Penney's store. I think the omission of the apostrophe was kind of artistic license, but I'm only addressing the silliness of adding the "S," with or without an apostrophe, to something that isn't a person's name.

I can understand Penney's or Dayton's since those were people who founded eponymous stores. I suppose we have our answer -- people established a habit of the "S" when that type of naming was so common, and extended it instinctively to all stores even though there was never a Mr. Kmart or a Mr. Circuit City.

Fun tangent: I learned pretty recently that the southern California grocery chain is named after a man with the last name "Ralphs," so it never had an apostrophe and indeed shouldn't have one (in any language).

It also appears in their German website https://pizzeriaunoffm.de/ "Uno's Pizza Explore Our Delicious Pizza" and USA https://restaurants.unos.com/locations/NY/New_York

I don't think there's a particular rule that a number can't act as a name like 007's movies. Or that the thing possessing has to be a person, eg. England's weather.

I'd argue this is less akin to calling Casino Royale "007's movie" but rather if you referred to the sequel to the Godfather as "Part II's movie". I suppose this is a bit of a philosophical question of whether the index of something is the same as the thing itself, but I think I fall in the camp that things exist distinct from the way we identify them, and names are just labels rather than some inherent part of the thing itself.

...it drives me crazy when I hear people refer to Pizzeria Uno as "Uno's"

Pedant Alert! The chain's name is "Uno Pizzeria & Grill".

You're not wrong, but the actual ordering of the name makes it less clear to a casual observer that there is no person named "Uno".

And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the corporate entity has accepted the name.

> And the domain the company uses is "unos.com", so at the corporate entity has accepted the name.

Yeah, I've heard servers there say "welcome to Uno's", so I know I've already lost the battle. Like I said, it's not a rational annoyance though, so that doesn't make me feel any better when I hear it.

To be honest, even when going to the original Pizzeria Uno (or Due) I’ll probably still call it “Uno’s” ‘cause it’s a weird part of the Chicago dialect. We do the same thing for the grocery store Jewel-Osco, calling it “da Jewels”

Fellow Chicagoan here. It's funny you say that. My wife calls Jewel-Osco "Jewels" lol. I am just starting to realize that not everyone talks this way haha.

Uno isn't a number in english though, and you wouldn't capitalize a number, so treating it as a name seems reasonable.

I love Uno's.

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