Pike Place Fish Market - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Pike Place Fish Market, founded in 1930, is an open air fish market

Fish market

A fish market is a marketplace used for marketing fish products. It can be dedicated to wholesale trade between fishermen and fish merchants, or to the sale of seafood to individual consumers, or to both...

located in Seattle, Washington's

Seattle, Washington

Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...

Pike Place Market

Pike Place Market is a public market overlooking the Elliott Bay waterfront in Seattle, Washington, United States. The Market opened August 17, 1907, and is one of the oldest continually operated public farmers' markets in the United States. It is a place of business for many small farmers,...

, at the corner of Pike Street and Pike Place. It is known for their tradition of fishmonger

Fishmonger

A fishmonger is someone who sells fish and seafood...

s throwing fish that customers have purchased, before they are wrapped. After nearing bankruptcy in 1986, the fish market owner and employees decided to become "world famous", changing their way of doing business by introducing their flying fish, games, and customer performances. Four years later, they were featured repeatedly in the national media and television shows. The store is now a popular tourist destination in Seattle, attracting up to 10,000 daily visitors, and is often billed as world-famous.

History

The Pike Place Fish Market was purchased in 1965 by John Yokoyama, a former employee of the fish market, who bought the store to make enough money on an owner's salary to afford the car payments on his new Buick Riviera

Buick Riviera

The Riviera by Buick is an automobile produced by Buick in the United States from the 1963 to 1999 model years, with 1,127,261 produced.A full-size coupé or personal luxury car, the early models of the Riviera in particular have been highly praised by automotive journalists and writers.A common...

. Initially, Pike Place Fish Market was unknown outside of the Seattle area, but Yokoyama and his staff decided to change that in a meeting with a business coach in 1986. Prior to the meeting, the Pike Place Fish Market was near to bankruptcy

Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....

, and the consultant, Jim Bergquist, was helping them to conceive of ways to save the business. A fish market employee at the meeting suggested that they not only save the business, but make it "world famous", with the ideas for the business' flying and thrown fish, games with customers, and staff attitudes of always enjoying their work, so that customers would as well. In an interview, Yokoyama stated, "We took a stand that we were going to become world famous. We just said it and it became so."

Four years later, in 1990, the Goodwill Games

Goodwill Games

The Goodwill Games was an international sports competition, created by Ted Turner in reaction to the political troubles surrounding the Olympic Games of the 1980s...

were held in Seattle. News crews at the Pike Place Market discovered the fish market and its performances with customers, and they filmed them. Soon afterwards, the fish market appeared on Good Morning America
Good Morning America
Good Morning America is an American morning news and talk show that is broadcast on the ABC television network; it debuted on November 3, 1975. The weekday program airs for two hours; a third hour aired between 2007 and 2008 exclusively on ABC News Now...

, leading to the business and its employees being filmed by various film crews, and being featured in numerous magazines. Now, during the summer tourist season, the fishmongers will perform now in front of as many as 10,000 visitors daily. The success of the business has been cited to its human resources and employee attitudes. The employees of the fish market will often speak to businesses, civic groups, and schools on ways to be successful, and has led to their being featured in motivational books.

A popular feature at the Pike Place Fish Market is the monkfish

Monkfish

Monkfish is the English name of a number of types of fish in the northwest Atlantic, most notably the species of the anglerfish genus Lophius and the angelshark genus Squatina...

, which sometimes, thanks to a hidden line, is made to "snap" at customers. In 1991, CNN

CNN

Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

named the Pike Place Fish Market as one of the three most fun places to work in America.

Flying fish

The Pike Place Fish Market is best known for their habit of hurling customers' orders across the shopping area. A typical routine will involve a customer ordering a fish, with their fishmongers in orange rubber overalls and boots calling out the order, which is loudly shouted back by all the other staff, at which point the original fishmonger will throw the customer's fish behind the counter for wrapping. Initially, the shouted repeating of the ordered fish began as a prank on one employee, but was enjoyed by customers, so it became a tradition. While working, the staff continually yell to each other and chant in unison while they throw ordered fish. At times, the fish market staff will throw a foam fish into the crowd to scare bystanders, or select a customer from the crowds to participate in the fish toss. Above the areas in which they throw fish, the market hangs a sign that reads, "Caution: Low Flying Fish".

Films, books and popular culture

In 1998, the Pike Place Fish Market was the subject of a documentary film and accompanying book, FISH! Philosophy
FISH! philosophy
The FISH! philosophy is a workplace management system created by John Christensen. The system was first published as a film, with a spin-off series of books....

. The Pike Place Fish Market has also been the setting for several best-selling corporate training videos, the aforementioned FISH!, and also FISH!Sticks, which have been used by firms such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Enterprise Holdings, Inc. is a privately held company formed in 2009 to operate rental car subsidiaries: Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental, Alamo Rent A Car, WeCar and its commercial fleet management, used car sales, and commercial truck rental operations.Enterprise Holdings was formed as...

, Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel Corporation is an American telecommunications company based in Overland Park, Kansas. The company owns and operates Sprint, the third largest wireless telecommunications network in the United States, with 53.4 million customers, behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility...

, Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines Co. is an American low-cost airline based in Dallas, Texas. Southwest is the largest airline in the United States, based upon domestic passengers carried,...

, Sainsbury's, Saturn, and Scottish and Southern Energy, for employee training. The Pike Place Fish Market has been featured in a variety of television shows and commercials. These include a Spike Lee

Spike Lee

Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983....

Levis

Levi Strauss & Co.

Levi Strauss & Co. is a privately held American clothing company known worldwide for its Levi's brand of denim jeans. It was founded in 1853 when Levi Strauss came from Buttenheim, Franconia, to San Francisco, California to open a west coast branch of his brothers' New York dry goods business...

jeans commercial; MTV

MTV

MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....

's The Real World
The Real World
The Real World is a reality television program on MTV originally produced by Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray. First broadcast in 1992, the show, which was inspired by the 1973 PBS documentary series An American Family, is the longest-running program in MTV history and one of the...

; NBC

NBC

The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

's Frasier
Frasier
Frasier is an American sitcom that was broadcast on NBC for eleven seasons, from September 16, 1993, to May 13, 2004. The program was created and produced by David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee in association with Grammnet and Paramount Network Television.A spin-off of Cheers, Frasier stars...

, and ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

's Good Morning America. In films, they have appeared in Free Willy
Free Willy
Free Willy is a 1993 family film directed by Simon Wincer, and released by Warner Bros. under its Family Entertainment label. The film stars Jason James Richter as a young boy who befriends an orca whale, named "Willy."...

.

External links

Pike Place Fish Market official website
5:12:60 official blog

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

Flying fish

Films, books and popular culture

Further reading

External links