Posted on 06/14/2022 6:13:18 AM PDT by devane617
Last week was more than just the end of Howard Johnson's. It marked one more place in our culture that lost touch with its customers because the owners had little in common with them.
HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pennsylvania—In truth, the last Howard Johnson’s restaurant closed long before the one in Lake George, New York, did last week. The only thing that particular location had in common with the fried clams and 28 flavors of ice cream the restaurant was famous for was maintaining the iconic orange roof that signaled to families for generations you were pulling up to a place you could trust for known comfort food at reasonable prices.
What began as Howard Deering Johnson taking over his father’s struggling medicine store and soda fountain in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1925 grew because of his keen understanding of what people were looking for. The 27-year-old had vision and understood people. He improved the quality of the ice cream, added well-prepared food for customers to eat, and soon, he went from deeply in debt to flourishing.
Four years later, Johnson opened a second restaurant and was selling his popular ice cream at stands along the beach.
Unofficial-official Howard Johnson’s restaurant historian Walter Mann details on his HoJoLand.com website that Johnson was a bit of a visionary who saw the love Americans had for the open roads and their cars and understood that as the U.S. road system expanded, families would be packing up their vehicles.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
Take out the "human" element and the manager who is ad knows his customers and you get failure. Anything can fail when the "management" is out of touch. This is what scares me about our republic and out of touch politicians.
I live near where the first Howard Johnson’s was.
I also live near the first Dunkin Donuts.
Vestiges of Americana. *sigh*
Same thing happened in Silicon Valley to companies like HP - the people-oriented visionaries who began these innovative companies were replaced by green eye shade Wall Street nerds who’s only concern was profitability.
The good times will inevitably end when money is the only focus.
I grew up near HoJo’s biggest restaurant. Too posh for our family to eat there, but Mom and her friend would occasionally take us kids there for cones in late 40s/early 50s.
“The Queen of the Chain” advertised as the world’s largest roadside restaurant.
http://www.highwayhost.org/NewYork/Restaurants/RegoPark/regopark1.htm
Family(s) have been down graded.
What’s important NOW is the single individual.
Charge him/her/it $10 for a coffee drink and let him/her/it play with their cell phones and all is well.
Intended.
Intentional.
Purposeful.
And planned.
We are Carthage. Sad to see.
This country sold its soul to God Money.
We need to reinvigorate private ownership in this country. The New York Stock Exchange is largely parasitic.
When we would travel back east to my aunt’s house in Poughkeepsie new York back in the 60s on route 66 we’d stop at Howard Johnsons. Fond memories. And Stuckeys.
We will have pinheads for politicians until we start reminding them that they are our servants and our hired help - and we start treating them as such. They are, in reality, the least elite of the population. The fact that a public parasite like Biden calls people 'pal' is emblematic of how much the laughably pathetic narcissists in public office have inflated their own egos.
It's more the rule than the exception that after the original management passes on a business declines and folds. Part of that is individual genius, a little is luck, and some is just time. You mention that HoJo's may have invented franchising, well OK, and maybe they invented the "coffee shop" especially the chain version, but there's no moat on that and soon there were franchise coffee shops regionally and nationally. And 31 Flavors overwhelmed their main attraction, and indeed every supermarket today offers a couple of dozen packaged flavors. Sears is another matter, a bit more complicated, but all of retail has changed dramatically, a couple of times, since the 1950s. I remember the catalogs, too, but the shopping center invented in the 1950s obsoleted Sears as a one-stop shopper, leaving Sears in old locations, they never made sense as shopping center anchors for that very reason. So really on those two examples, they "retired" 30+ years ago and now pass away down the corridors of time.
OT, but possibly of interest... the cupola atop this HoJo appears to be copied from the tower at the older, nearby Newtown HS
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtown_High_School_(Queens)
Yep, things change. Look at the “malls” now. We have some on the bus route that people won’t go to because of the random crimes, the malls are half empty. When the ferals are roaming and not there to shop, it kinds ruins the attractiveness.
Best fried clams ever. HoJo’s was our Saturday night ritual among my high school friends after we all got off from work in our minimum wage part time jobs. Our girlfriends would meet us there. Around midnight we would head home.
As Chris Rock said, there are two kinds of malls:
- The malls white people go to.
- The malls white people used to go to.
that’s funny. Proving the best comedy is based on reality.
SNL is bypassing a motherload of material.
HP once made the world’s best electronic measurement equipment, bar none. Meticulous engineering, rigorous testing and a service arm that backed it all up.
Then came Carly et al.... they figured that there was more money in printers. Not really any printers; but inkjet printers they could virtually give away to get customers. Why? The resales on ink was the bottom line. They sold off their legacy instrument division to Agilent and went total idiot consumer oriented.
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