Seattle bagels get political
How did bagels end up at the center of a Seattle city council campaign?
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Billboards and mailers promoting a local bagel shop are par for the course when it comes to daily living in a city. However, some Seattle residents have grown increasingly confused by the mixed messaging they’ve been receiving from Eltana and its owner, Stephen Brown.
Chances are, at some point recently you’ve driven or walked past one of the four Eltana billboards around Seattle that include an innocuous phrase about bagels and appear, at first, to simply be marketing for the company. However, some of those billboards are pretty far away from their Capitol Hill and Wallingford locations, including one in West Seattle and one on Highway 99 en route to West Seattle, which just so happens to be in Seattle City Council District 1, a seat that Brown is currently running for in the upcoming election.
If you don’t get out much, you might have instead come across a YouTube video titled “Stephen Brown from Eltana Bagels.” The description of the video, which has over 97,000 views, reads “Stephen Brown fixed the bagel problem in Seattle, bringing people and communities together.” Even though the video seems like a promotion of Brown, it ends with a mention of Eltana and where you can find their bagels.
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