Boston Market was my first job, from 2000-2004. It barely paid above minimum wage, I was working 6 days a week and not even getting 40 hours, and they were terrible about giving breaks, but it paid the bills when I was just starting out.
The location I worked at closed over 10 years ago now. It was a bank before it was a restaurant and is now a bank again. (Funny story; when I worked there there was a switch in the freezer that nobody knew what it was for. The manager flipped it one day and about ten minutes later the cops showed up - turned out it was a silent alarm that had never been deactivated.)
I do like a good ‘mystery switch’ story, and that’s a fine one. I’m assuming it was originally installed in the freezer because, often when restaurants get robbed, the employees are herded into the freezer or cooler. Or maybe, it was just a good hidden location to run back to in the case of a robbery.
I remember when Boston Market popped up in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area in the 1990s. Like many of you, I enjoyed it because it was convenient, tasty, and a nice change of pace from other “fast” food establishments. I haven’t been to a BM since 1999 or so and if we ever had one here in Arkansas I never saw it. Too bad. I’d be more likely to eat there now than I was in the 90s.
I did notice the one in my town has closed. I blamed it on being in a bad location, too close to a big intersection. You could only turn into it one way and the exit made you go through two lanes of traffic to go in the direction you were traveling.
I used to go to one in the town I worked in because it was within walking distance. Food was never great.
KFC is the next on my radar for failing franchises (not in mid west I suppose) They have real quality control issues and the prices are well over a quick/easy meal.
A long time ago I was on a week-long business trip to California by myself, so for the few nights I treated myself to upscale sit-down restaurants (I was an a generous expense account). That got really old really fast, plus I started missing more traditional foods. I didn’t want fast food or to take takeout back to my room. Boston Market filled the gap between cheap and fancy very nicely.
Oh yeah, @Smapti did say it was a bank, then a Boston Market, and then a bank again. Which is weird. But apparently stuff like that has been known to happen. That reddit link to a Walgreen’s “Vitamin Vault” looks like a joke, but I have certainly seen stranger things.
I’ve seen other pictures of similar conversions. The school district I coach in had it’s office in a former bank. The superintendent’s office was in the vault.
I remember going to Boston Market about thirty years ago and liking it quite a bit. Rotisserie chicken and a couple of sides made for a better lunch than the typical fast food hamburger. But then a few years later, I was at one, and it seemed that the chicken legs were a lot smaller. The earlier ones were enough but the later ones were so small that they looked like they came off a Cornish game hen.
The very first time I ever ate there, I thought it was pretty good, but the second time I ate there, I thought it was not so good. I can’t say how long the interim was between the two visits, but I don’t think it was terribly long.
One family member used to like to bring it to family gatherings so I was glad ours closed quite awhile back.
This is the first I’ve read that Friendly’s is dead/dying. I used to go to Friendly’s when I visited my grandparents (closed), and hubby and I went there when we were first dating (closed) / married (still open).
Boston Chicken, later Boston Market, was a great alternative to McDonald’s and the like, when we were working on our house in the 1990s. It was close to Home Depot, so when we did a supply run, we stopped to get food as well.
I think we may have even got food for Thanksgiving one year, as the family Thanksgiving was on Friday or Saturday. For just the two of us, it was a great alternative.
When we would visit my inlaws in the early 2000s, we would mention Boston Market as a possibility, but my sister-in-law said that their food was no longer edible.
I used to make a stuffing recipe which was supposed to be a knock-off of Boston Market’s recipe and hubby liked their cornbread, which has sugar. If I think about the food, I do remember the meatloaf being overly salty.
KFC is just starting to expand in Switzerland, along with Dunkin’ Donuts. But Switzerland is slow to adapt to food trends.
Bank Vaults are very sturdily built – and would be extremely expensive to remove. If you’re buying a ‘used’ building for your business, you’re keeping costs low. So you will not spend a lot of money removing a vault.
Definitely, in my recollection. It was pretty good when they were in their boom phase in the mid-late '90s, but the chain went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998 (due to debt incurred when they expanded rapidly), and was bought by McDonald’s in 2000 (mostly for their real estate, if the Wikipedia article is accurate). McDonald’s then spun it off in 2007.
From what I remember, it was in that post-1998 time frame that quality went downhill, which is also when we stopped eating there regularly.
Agreed. It was surprisingly decent earlier in the 1990’s. Not great IMO, but solidly good in a mid-level hofbrau sort of way. I only ever ate one once after the bankruptcy and it was just as surprisingly mediocre. I don’t know if their business plan was ever really viable, but once they started to decline they seemed to have declined pretty hard.