Half the lights have gone out and I'm worried

Wednesday night, and I was feeling hungry and tired and dispirited. This seemed like an excellent opportunity to use the facilities of the new Chinese just down the road. I'd been there once and enjoyed the food, and if you can't eat takeaway when you're feeling hungry and tired and dispirited, when are you going to eat it?

(There can be few more dispiriting sights for the single man than a woman looking at him with a look of confusion bordering on bewilderment. Most other expressions can be dealt with - anger, grave offence, disgust, anything along those lines can be elegantly danced around, but not confusion. You can't confuse someone and expect her to call you back, no matter how much you apologise and put it down to the insomnia. The only more dispiriting look I can think of is that of the parent glaring at you when you respond to a question that their small child has asked you, as if agreeing that they have a lot of sticklebricks or whatever automatically makes you a paedophile.)

The Chinese takeaway had opened rather suddenly. The shop was a Chinese before but had been closed ever since I moved here, with only the eerie glow of an empty fridge to indicate any sign of life. Then, a few weeks back, a new sign appeared outside and the shop was open for business in about two days flat. At around the same time, the rubbish Indian takeaway a few doors along from it had turned into a chicken takeaway, with a generic chicken takeaway name like "Chicken Spot" or something like that. As I approached the Chinese on Wednesday, I noticed that the sign proclaiming the chicken takeaway to be called "Chicken Shack" or whatever had disapeared, although the shop was still open.

Yesterday morning, as I passed on the bus en route to Sainsbury's, I noticed that the chicken takeaway had a new name: Mr Chicken's. Here it is with some of the other, equally scintillating, shops on the parade in a shot expertly taken from the bus on the way home from Sainsbury's:


Not only does the timing of the renaming seem odd - it's only been open a month or so if that, and being that rare thing, a chicken takeaway without three other chicken takeaways in close proximity, there's no need for it to distinguish itself from the competition - but why "Mr Chicken's"?

I'm not objecting to the rogue apostrophe: these things happen. I could understand if they'd called it "Mr Chicken": Mr Chicken sounds like the definitive, last word in greasy, smelly fast food, whereas Mr Chicken's seems, well, less authoritative somehow, as if they have to reassure the public that they have more than one chicken and aren't going to run out. I'm sure even the most ill-educated chicken takeaway customer is going to be able to guess that all of those aren't coming from one giant infinito-chicken with drumsticks that grow again every time one's torn off, unless those Jamie Oliver programmes were more effective than we could have imagined.