We often find "the same place" repeated many times: the franchise. Franchise repetition goes beyond similarity. It is not accidental that one McDonald's restaurant looks like another. Different locations, different contexts, "same" place -- but what kind of sameness? Franchised places are not all parts of one big place; we don't expect the trajectories of a single action to involve multiple McDonald's restaurants.
The original hamburger stand built by the McDonald brothers in California no longer exists. It doesn't matter whether or not current restaurants look like the originals or serve the same menu. If historians discovered that the McDonald brothers had never really been associated with those original restaurants, or that the restaurants had really been latte bars, that would not affect the legitimacy of the current restaurants. McDonald's franchises do not get their authenticity from any relation to a privileged original, but from faithfulness to a rule.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001