Sounds like it was kinda like In n Out Burger.
Accountants will inevitably kill a restaurant’s quality. They will point out, accurately, that slightly cutting corners will cut costs and cumulatively generate a huge bottom line profit. The big problem is that there’s always one more corner to cut, and the cumulative effect of that is that they wind up producing crap.
Hadn’t been to Wendy’s in quite a while. Stopped at one while on the road recently and was quite surprised at the drop in quality since my last visit. Hamburgers were now dry and tasteless, and their chili, which used to be pretty darn tasty, although it was a stretch to call it chili, was lousy.
The only preventative to this, I suspect, is to have a number one guy for whom quality is more important than an additional .001 profit per unit.
The short-sightedness of this is the result of the fact that the higher profits are the limited in time result of the time lag between their cutting quality and the public’s perception. Sales stay up for a while, but eventually drop once people realize Wendy’s doesn’t have tasty food anymore. What they are doing in essence is parasitizing and destroying their own brand, by far their greatest asset.
A decade or so ago, some fast food place, can’t remember which one, had an ad campaign trying to reverse this process. It was based essentially on claims that, “Our food isn’t crap anymore.”
“Sounds like it was kinda like In n Out Burger.”
I had thought of mentioning exactly that. In-N-Out retains the high quality that Carl’s Jr once had as well when it was still a family business.
It’s interesting that In-N-Out’s Rich Snyder was as devoted an evangelical as Carl Karcher was a devoted Catholic. Both delivered high quality to their customers and both were famous for how well they treated their employees. In-N-Out is still privately owned and still does. Carl’s greatness is but a memory.
“Accountants will inevitably kill a restaurant’s quality. They will point out, accurately, that slightly cutting corners will cut costs and cumulatively generate a huge bottom line profit. The big problem is that there’s always one more corner to cut, and the cumulative effect of that is that they wind up producing crap.”
That’s pretty much what happened at Carl’s. When the MBAs took over they started cutting things. Cheaper was better. Unlike Carl Karcher they didn’t routinely eat at “their” own stores so they didn’t care what the product was as long as someone else would buy it. And they fired long time employees, employees who took a personal pride in Carl’s success and who had made it run well for many years. To an MBA these employees were as replaceable as paper towels. But of course they weren’t.