In short: stuffy Fortune 500 company NCR settles agreement with neighboring longstanding mainstay gentlemen’s club The Cheetah, to remove their iconic rotating sign, presumably so it wasn’t so obvious that their fancy Midtown offices wasn’t practically right next to, a strip club
NCR is a company in which just hearing the name would probably elicit crickets from most people. But NCR is also the company that makes products that all around the world, people have seen their products: card readers, ATM components, and all sorts of POS equipment. Yeah, NCR is vastly responsible for the majority of that crap all across the globe.
They’re also a company that I have personally dealt with at a previous place I worked, and they were what I would describe as a problem child of a business to work with. Nitpicky as all hell, demanding, inconsiderate of both time and resources, I spent many extra hours of my life working on their shit, and with each round of corrections, they demanded fresh hard copies of their training materials to review, no matter how small or inconsequential the changes were.
No lie, I must’ve used at least two boxes of letter paper for just their training manuals alone, and that was just to develop them. I can’t imagine how many trees had to die for these fucks to actually produce them after they were finalized and approved to send to the printer.
Frankly, I have no love lost for NCR. I resent them as a company and I can’t help but twitch when I use a card somewhere and I catch a glimpse of their logo on the POS equipment that I have to use in order to finish a transaction.
But that was just how they affected me; and now they’re affecting the landscapes of our fair city, Atlanta? By forcibly having removed, one of icons of the city, that was here long before they even had any consideration of coming into Atlanta?
I mean seriously, doesn’t the whole notion of “we were here first” mean anything anymore? Because The Cheetah’s been an Atlanta fixture for decades. They were firmly entrenched on Spring Street long before Georgia Tech began its infectious sprawl, and all these tech companies wanted to get their foot into Midtown. The Cheetah has always held this reputation of being one of the “classier” strip joints, and the laundry list of celebrity names that have been connected to them goes to show their cultural impact on the heartbeat of the city.
It was inevitable that there would be some bitching, as the surrounding area began developing more and more, as student housing and stuffy companies like NCR came onto the block. Hell, even when I was working on the block, when there were mostly parking lots and Publix as the only things nearby, were there complaining that the presence of a strip club posed security concerns for the surrounding area. Frankly, The Cheetah was one of the more secure joints in the area, since they had their own security, valets and were pretty well encapsulated during their business hours. There’s regularly more crime in areas well outside of the zip code of The Cheetah, but don’t let facts get in the way of a bullish narrative.
Ultimately, NCR got what they wanted, and the Cheetah is getting rid of their iconic rotating sign. Thankfully it doesn’t come without a price for the fuckers at NCR, and although currently undisclosed, I hope NCR had to unload a mint in order to get the Cheetah to acquiesce, because there’s no way they could have legally forced them to remove it.
The irony is that if the people I worked for at NCR are any indication, their company is helmed by predominantly white middle aged men, whom are probably the precise clientele that are going to the Cheetah in the first place. And frankly, the actual predominantly white middle aged men of NCR are the ones most often going there, since they’re literally right next door. They probably wanted the Cheetah to get rid of their sign, so that it wasn’t so flamboyantly obvious that they were having titty lunches on such a regular basis, and that it’s worth paying actual company funds to pay for the illusion that they have some decency. Pretty white of them, but definitely nothing out of the ordinary for white folks.
But in the end, fuck NCR, for having the hubris to think they’re too good to be obviously next to a strip club. The Cheetah deserves some fucking respect, and no person on the planet would give two shits if every POS equipment were spontaneously switched out to some other company’s. But steak and tits? Those things will always have value, recognition and a demand, and way more than NCR’s bullshit will ever command.
