If one restaurant is good, then two restaurants is even better, right? Opening chain restaurants really came about with travel. Fred Harvey opened many Harvey House restaurants along a railroad line for travelers. If a traveler had eaten at one Harvey House, they knew what to expect from the next one. Once the automobile came along and highways were built, that idea blew up and dozens of chain restaurants flourished. But in the 21st century, the business of chain restaurants started to contract, with many chains of sit-down restaurants shrinking or closing, while other flourished and new chains were born. Weird History Food explains the rise and current state of chain restaurants in America.
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
The Rise and Fall of Chain Restaurants
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3 comments:
Olive Garden specialized in Italianish food, no Michelin stars, and not Mama Leone’s, but not terrible. Then the internet trolls made it the punchline to a lot of bad jokes so it became uncool. If you want to impress a date or client or friend, uncool is not the place to go. They took in $4.5 Billion in 2022 from 887 locations and increased to 915 now.
The other threat to chains is Private Equity buying the chain, using it as equity to borrow huge piles of cash leaving the chain to make the payments leaving nothing to go back into the business so they go downhill and default.
Private Community hospitals are having the same problem with private equity. This is where the 1% put the money that was supposed to “trickle down”.
Excuse me while I put my soapbox away.
xoxoxoBruce
Red Lobster was bought by a hedge fund, which proceeded to rape and pillage all the company’s assets until only a hollow shell was left. The hedge fund sold off all of Red Lobster’s land, and leased it back to the company, driving into bankruptcy. It’s happened before, and will happen again.
Vultures!
The problem is that those hedge funds are untouchable because they have politicians of BOTH parties bought and paid for. Don’t believe the platitudes and vitriol coming at you from either of the two sock-puppet candidates who are running for office. It’s all smoke and mirrors meant to distract you from corporate corruption.
Vote independent.
At the risk of pulling out Bruce's soapbox and mounting it myself, if you're going to vote independent you might as well stay home and save your time and gas money. In the American system, any vote for an independent candidate as a show of displeasure or rejection of politics as usual is, in effect, a vote for politics as usual since history has shown that even independent candidates from well-established and well-funded parties have about the same chances of winning as a snowflake has of surviving on a hot griddle. They are nothing more than a nuisance, and even well-heeled campaigns like Ross Perot's independent runs or those of the Libertarian or the Green parties attract so little attention that their eventual vote counts usually fall within the margin of error of most major polls. Let's face it ... in a race between a Ferrari, a Porsche, and a Yugo, if you want to bet on the Yugo, be my guest – but it will end up in tears.
-"BB"-
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