Every morning from Monday to Friday I emerge from the F train on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and walk west. Invariably these last few years, I've had to walk past the detritus that the Kentucky Fried Chicken between Sixth and Fifth on 14th had left for the sanitation department to collect.

The mess was always awful: bread crumbs, uneaten bits of dead chickens, unidentifiable fluids leaking from black bags. Not the kind of thing to make consumers want to rush inside and say to the bored kid behind the counter: "Give me some more of the stuff you've got outside."

Apparently, my feelings of disgust were shared by others, because the KFC on 14th is no longer in business. Outside, the street is as clean as a whistle, and in the doorway this morning as I walked by was a homeless guy sitting on newspapers, having a snooze.