It’s ironic seeing Carl’s Jr boycotted by conservative Mormon girls. Carl’s used to be the target of feminists and gay rights groups back when it was run by its conservative Catholic patriarch Carl Karcher. And the soft-porn Carl’s commercials don’t just bother Mormon girls, they greatly offended the Catholic founder of Carl’s Jr as well. But he no longer controlled the company.
In the 1960s Carl’s Jr never had to advertise. Carl’s Jr food was so far superior to its competitors that there was little need to advertise. The pretty girls worked behind the counter.
Carl’s Jr began as a family owned chain in southern California. And from what I know he treated his long time employees like family. I heard of a fry cook whose family received a Hawaiian vacation from Carl. Loyalty counted for a lot.
In the 1980s Carl’s went from being a private family owned company to becoming a public stockholder corporation. That was the seed of Carl’s undoing at least to those of us who remember what it was. Carl Karcher lost control of the company he founded and was pushed out by the board of directors. Growth became the new goal of the number crunchers who took over, and quality took a back seat. Advertising aimed at teenage males would replace the word of mouth that used to serve Carl’s Jr so well. Carl died in 2008 at the age of 90.
Carl Karcher really should be nomintated for Sainthood.
His company has gone to Hell, but there is no doubt that he went straight to Heaven.
He got leveraged out of his own company because he refused to bow to the God of Political Correctness. They still use his name on their company, but their company is now run by greedy sex crazed abortion supporting Obama minions.
Your last paragraph says it all
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.”
Thanks for the information. I remember Carl’s Jr. from when we lived in California, until 1975. My mother considered them the best hamburger place ... until sometime after I finished college - late 80s, early 90s, when she said they weren’t any good anymore.
In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Dear Mormon Chicks: Why Don’t You Stop Boycotting Carl’s Jr.’s And Boycott Islam?, Pelham wrote:
It’s ironic seeing Carl’s Jr boycotted by conservative Mormon girls. Carl’s used to be the target of feminists and gay rights groups back when it was run by its conservative Catholic patriarch Carl Karcher. And the soft-porn Carl’s commercials don’t just bother Mormon girls, they greatly offended the Catholic founder of Carl’s Jr as well. But he no longer controlled the company.
In the 1960s Carl’s Jr never had to advertise. Carl’s Jr food was so far superior to its competitors that there was little need to advertise. The pretty girls worked behind the counter.
Carl’s Jr began as a family owned chain in southern California. And from what I know he treated his long time employees like family. I heard of a fry cook whose family received a Hawaiian vacation from Carl. Loyalty counted for a lot.
In the 1980s Carl’s went from being a private family owned company to becoming a public stockholder corporation. That was the seed of Carl’s undoing at least to those of us who remember what it was. Carl Karcher lost control of the company he founded and was pushed out by the board of directors. Growth became the new goal of the number crunchers who took over, and quality took a back seat. Advertising aimed at teenage males would replace the word of mouth that used to serve Carl’s Jr so well. Carl died in 2008 at the age of 90.
Carl Karcher’s son was the priest, at a parish in my SoCal town.