|
tesg's guide to big chain road food consumption
CHAIN -- Hardee's Oh look! Hardee's has a new logo. (As does Carl's Jr.) I don't know... It's too busy. The font is too hard to read. Imagine it on signage from a distance. You're coming up on an interstate exit and instantly make out McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell...but "What's that busy sign say?" you think as you rear end the state trooper because you were trying to figure out what the busy sign said instead of watching the road. Then you're on "World's Wildest Police Videos" for the next hundred years, where the narrator says "Instead of getting a burger, he's getting a jail cell." You lose your job, your spouse, your car, and everybody laughs at you. You die of a broken heart and nobody cares. Your carcass is buried in a pine box behind the impound yard. Coyotes dig it up and...what was I talking about? After years of mediocrity (okay, that's being polite), Hardee's launched a turnaround of sorts by discarding their entire menu in favor of big premium burgers made from Angus beef. The "Thickburger" line turned around Hardee's sales declines. This was unthinkable a couple of years ago. Wilbur Hardee opened his first walk-up stand in Greenville, NC, in 1960. The enormously successful stand attracted Jim Gardner and Leonard Rawls Jr, businessmen from Rocky Mount, NC. They convinced Hardee to partner up, and the trio formed Hardee's Drive-Ins, later changed to Hardee's Food Systems. The first company-owned store opened in Rocky Mount in 1961. The first franchisee opened in 1962. Hardee himself bowed out of the operation early in its expansion. He died in 2008. He went on to launch several other restaurant concepts.
Hardee's expanded partly by buying up other chains and converting them, sort of like if the Catholic church went around buying other churches and forced all members to convert to the Catholic faith. You're always going to end up with some bitter apples. Their 1990 purchase and subsequent conversion of the Roy Rogers chain ended in a customer revolt so serious that they actually aborted the whole idea and returned the Roy Rogers brand to some stores initially converted. The Sandy's brand was replaced by the Hardee's logo in 1972. The last successful conversion (Roy Rogers notwithstanding) was Burger Chef, acquired in 1982 and still missed by its fans to the point that there are several tribute sites on the web. After Roy Rogers, Imasco figured out that the fast-food industry was in decline and started discussing exit strategies. Possibilities, including a sale, were mentioned beginning in 1990. This may explain why, about this time, Hardee's started to crack. The next seven years were not good ones. As Imasco looked for ways to cut costs, or sell the chain outright, customers stopped coming. Who could blame them? Customer service quality was getting worse all the time, and frequent revamps of the menu left you wondering if what you liked yesterday would even BE on the menu today. Hardee's experimented with new sandwiches, fried chicken (still available in some markets), optional sides like chili or macaroni and cheese, and countless other variations on all of the above. These would appear overnight, and be gone the next. The Hardee's loved in the eighties was gone, dead and buried. The one shining jewel Hardee's had left was its breakfast. The breakfast menu, highlighted by "made from scratch" biscuits, was introduced by the original (and currently largest) Hardee's franchisee, Boddie-Noell, and rolled out nationally in 1978. CKE Restaurants, also known as Carl Karcher Enterprises, was built on the back of the Carl's Jr hamburger chain. Carl's Jr was as dominant as any hamburger chain in California that wasn't called McDonald's, often only being behind McDonald's in market share. Carl's Jr was loved for their premium charbroiled burgers topped so heavily that their marketing slogan was "If it doesn't get all over the place, it doesn't belong in your face." Carl's Jr placed their heaviest marketing around their double-patty burgers. Their crown jewel was the double-patty "Super Star". Karcher was overthrown from the board in 1993 and effectively staged a coup utilizing the talents of William P Foley. Foley put CKE’s paws into all sorts of concepts, including JB's Restaurants, Galaxy Diner, Rally's, and Taco Bueno. Foley was also working on some dual-branding of Carl's Jr with a California Mexican fast food chain called Green Burrito. Partnerships were mostly minority investments that were ultimately spun off or sold to Green Burrito's parent company, who became Santa Barbara Restaurant Group (also headed by Foley), who in turn invested in and/or spun off the various concepts, eventually merging with CKE outright in 2002 and giving CKE 100 percent control of its brands at the time (Green Burrito, Timber Lodge Steakhouse, and La Salsa.) Somewhere in the middle of all this (1997), CKE purchased the 3,119-unit Hardee's outright. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
I remember going into one of the original converted Hardee's a few months after the fact, then sporting the name "Carl's Jr", in Peoria. The help, still being asked questions by customers, would say things like "It's from out West, that's all we know" with bitter resonance. The burgers weren't nearly as good as their west coast counterparts. The restaurants weren't nearly as nice either. The haphazard remodels and the aforementioned "who cares" employees really hurt.
CKE bled money for a couple of years and ended up concentrating on ridding itself of debt by selling off assets (company-owned stores and the Taco Bueno chain) instead of concentrating on the restaurants. So Hardee's was allowed to continue to provide some of the industry's worst service and quality without interruption. In 2002, while McDonald's and Burger King were getting ready to have a dollar war, Carl's Jr rolled out something called the "Six Dollar Burger". It was a $3.95 monster that featured a half-pound patty and premium toppings. It was a huge success. So much so that they later rolled it out at Hardee's, who you could say was surviving on $2 for $2 specials of various menu items, but, "surviving" would be stretching it. My local market went from more than a dozen stores to just two today in the span of a couple of years. The Hardee's of today has over 1,000 fewer stores than the Hardee's that existed when CKE bought the chain. If you go back to the 1980's, Hardee's has roughly HALF the number of operating locations it once did. The Six Dollar Burger also struck a chord at Hardee's, apparently enough so that Hardee's executives were commenting in the press that they were planning to shift away from discounting in favor of emphasizing a premium product. I don't think anybody guessed how far they'd go to do it. The original St Louis test of the Thickburger menu was dubbed "Revolution" internally. The after-breakfast menu was completely abandoned, save for the already premium Chicken Breast Strips and the Big Roast Beef. Burgers (save for mini burgers called "Slammers") ranged in size from 1/3 pound to 2/3 pound. The Thickburgers were big looking, big tasting, and priced as such. It was as if they'd looked at the McDonald's-Burger King dollar war and said "Fine, we'll take the other end of the market." On paper, it was absolutely brilliant. The customer service format for the Thickburger concept isn't all that different from the original "Star" changes: Order at the counter, get your drink, have a seat, and your food will be brought to your table after it is cooked to order. You'll have longer wait times at the drive-thru, but frankly, you shouldn't be eating this stuff while driving in the first place. The Thickburgers were a hit. Hardee's is actually growing for the first time in years. Hardee's won several "Best Burger" awards in core Midwestern markets. Hardee's got a tremendous amount of press by rolling out a bunless version of the Thickburger targeted at the Atkins diet crowd which many articles credited as being a first, even if In-n-Out had been quietly offering it for years. Hardee's shamelessly played the press later with a Thickburger variation of the classic "Monster Burger", which one of those wacky nutritional groups labeled "food porn". In 2007, for the first time that I can remember, the number of operating Hardee's locations quarter-to-quarter actually went UP. Not everything is where it needs to be yet. Hardee's still has too many old buildings with worn interiors in undesirable locations. That may be part of the reason store numbers continue to decline (and if it is, it's probably a long-term benefit). Hardee's is planning extensive remodels of its entire base. Their new buildings look nice, if not a little generic. I like what they did with the windows (they go all the way to the ground with the bottom third being glass blocks). The new interior, also being used at Carl's Jr, is brown, brown, brown, red, brown, silver, brown, chrome, and brown, and is one of my least favorite interiors in the history of fast food. Just my opinion, though. Hardee's employee "uniforms" are company issued promotional T-shirts that look like they were cheaper to make than the burgers they promote. But customer service has generally improved to about be on par with where Carl's Jr is today (which isn't exactly what it used to be either, but is basically on par with most fast food chains). Investors wonder aloud why Hardee's still has its own corporate office (based in St Louis, a move from Rocky Mount that CKE made in the Star Hardee's days). I expect to see that office close eventually. Limited-time premium burgers rotate on the menu and have included a Chili Cheese Thickburger (which was actually on the original Thickburger menu but was eventually replaced by a Thickburger version of the Mushroom Swiss), a Jalapeno Thickburger, a Philly Cheesesteak Thickburger, a Western Bacon Thickburger, and a Prime Rib Thickburger, among others. Most of these are variations of the Carl's Jr lineup...or eventually become limited time offerings there too, sharing the same advertising. The Hardee's brand may have survived, but the lines between Hardee's and Carl's Jr continue to blur. Tragically, Hardee's has yet to adopt a version of Carl's excellent occasional Pastrami burger, which they could easily do using their 1/8 pound burger as a base. Hardee's replaced their fries with "natural-cut fries", a big improvement, and later added a "bacon cheddar" version that I approve of highly. Curly fries, a longtime Hardee's favorite, are also still available after an initial absence.
I still wonder what would have happened if CKE never purchased Hardee's in the first place, and just used all that money to build new stores and expand eastward on their own, with their own people, doing things their own way. Utah might be a good example for comparison. Just before the sale, Hardee's had a decent presence in Utah and ended up closing all their stores. Carl's Jr came in a year or two later, built new, and had no association of their name with Hardee's locally. They seem to be doing just fine. But the people are coming back to Hardee's. Click here to return to tesg's guide to big chain road food consumption
|
