Your city isn't unique

JJ with more high quality 'tent as usual

Denny's has always been "America's Diner" but I visited Vancouver and saw the sign on a Denny's said "Canada's Diner". Still not over it.

Every city in the South - "We are unique because we are a modern city with microbreweries, cuisines from around the world, an emerging tech hub but we celebrate our tradition like our southern charm, take things a little slower, have manners, the best fried chicken and bbq, but you don't know heat until you experience our heat".

Thankfully my hometown still has a very unique little mom-and-pop restaurant called "Cracker Barrel." Tons of local and regional antiques covering the walls, VERY UNIQUE.

"Keep weird", a phrase that apparently originated in Austin in 2000 and quickly transplanted all over the continent, is a surprisingly common sentiment, one which seems to equate to "we are a college town" in many cases, applying to cities such as Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor. All three could also to some extent be described as "smaller Portland".

The vast majority of local culture is heavily influenced by national culture these days. Even a place like Portland or Austin, which market themselves as "weird," are dominated by strip malls and cul de sacs. Another example are zoos. A lot of people seem to think that their local zoo is exceptionally amazing for some reason, but most zoos, at least in the United States, are quite similar.

"Keep __ weird" t-shirts and bumper stickers.

Noticed almost every city in the USA has a “unique” immersive Van Gogh experience

You know who has the worst case of perceived individuality? Summer camps. Everyone thinks their summer camp was so unique, when there's SO MUCH overlap in songs, games, birthday traditions, jokes about the food, etc.

The “Irish pub”. I am from NYC, which had a large number of immigrants from Ireland, and I grew up assuming that the (many) Irish pubs were an artifact of this immigrant community. Then I went to places that didn’t have a lot of Irish immigrants, and found pubs that were identical in every detail. It turns out that they are sold as prefab kits, so you can set up an “authentic Irish pub” anywhere in the world.

There is an entire Geoguessr map called “needles” or something of the sort, because now many cities around the world have their own observation tower like the Space Needle

I distinctly remember seeing a Facebook post about someone's home state that clearly had been taken from somewhere else and had the original state name scratched out and replaced. People still commented stuff like "Yep, that's [state] for you." I had already started realizing a lot of Midwest states had the same kitschy sayings, but that was definitely what hammered it home for me.

I thought everything in this video was obvious until he hit me with the squirrel truth bomb at the end and I was crushed. Damn it...I really thought my college's love/hate relationship with the squirrels and desire to make them the mascot was just us...

Another one for universities: "when [x] university was being constructed, the campus designers were so smart they didn't make the concrete paths, they just lets students walk over the grass, and then they just paved over where there was no grass!"

This may be more prevalent in the rust belt, but everybody in my parent’s generation would talk about how they could get a great paying job out of high school at one the many factories, but their town was uniquely affected by X plant closing, and it hasn’t recovered since.

I often see places claim as a joke that their “official bird” is the mosquito. As a kid I thought that was a joke unique to my province until I saw it in touristy places when I travelled as an adult.

Hey JJ! Long time fan, but excitedly this is maybe the first time I think I actually have a specific example I'd love to share about. I live in Texas, and when i was touring different universities in high school to see where I wanted to go, I first went to the University of Texas in Austin. Their tour guide made a huge deal not just about the campus squirrels, but that there was an albino squirrel that had been spotted around campus, and that he's a bit of a local mythical celebrity, talking about him in the way someone would about Bigfoot. They also said that students who see the albino squirrel will get an A on their next exam. That was all good and fun, until I toured my hometown Denton's University of North Texas, where lo and behold, the tour guide said the exact same thing. UNT even named their squirrel "Lucky", and after being a student here for 4 years, I can tell you the level of local stardom this albino squirrel has obtained is ridiculous, he's frequently seen in cartoon graphics standing right next to our school's mascot, and is commonly seen as our second mascot! It always cracks me up when people talk about it like it's unique to us. I've only toured schools in Texas so I'm not sure if specifically an albino squirrel is a uniquely Texan thing, but I thought it was really funny, and particularly felt called out when you brought up that part of the video. UNT's Lucky tradition goes so far that the poor little guy usually gets run over once a year and there's a huge vigil set out for him, and the university will "secretly" purchase a new albino squirrel to release on campus. There's even a bar/restaurant just off campus that uses Lucky as a mascot/theme! Really crazy stuff, great video!

The more interconnected the world, the less unique each city is. I would say New York, London and Singapore are all more similar to each other today than they are to their 1970s version for example. The further back you go, the more unique those cities would have been.

One I remember seeing on Twitter a lot is people from NYC insisting that bodegas are unique to them in some way. Bodegas are just small family-owned convenience stores under a different name, and every major city in North America has these. And yet New Yorkers insist for some reason that actually their bodegas are different. As for personal experience, I think this idea that each city has its unique food culture is perpetuated a lot. I'm from Québec City, and while it is true that we have one of the highest rates of restaurants per capita, thanks to tourism, this idea that the food we serve is specific or particular to Québec City is a bit misleading. I'm sure you can find restaurants in Montreal, or whatever, serving the same "unique Québécois flavours, that a lot of the restaurants in Québec City claim to serve. The incessant battle for being the best place to eat poutine, I think, is a good example of this.

The weather thing became a pet peeve of mine while I lived in Vancouver, but with a slight twist. There seemed to be this collective denial of Vancouver's winter climate. Vancouverites would boast about the mild winters and how it "almost never snows", but for five winters in a row during my time there, it would snow hard enough that public transit would crawl to a standstill, busses unable to climb the gentlest of slopes, skytrains stuck for an hour at a time, university exams canceled and delayed. And every single year, I would hear the excuse "well it never snows here, it's no wonder the city isn't prepared!" 🤦‍♂️ maybe I just got unlucky with my winters.