There is exactly ONE Sonic in greater Los Angeles - in Anaheim. (It’s not near any of that city’s tourist attractions - just a seemingly random location.) My wife and I have driven out there specifically for lunch - my having gotten her addicted while visiting family in Texas.
However, they seem to have nearly a dozen in the area around Bakersfield (one of those is in Tehachapi). This per their locator.
H. Salt’s Long Beach location is less than a mile from my home, but I’ve never been there. My wife speaks fondly of it - I’m getting the urge to try it out…
Don’t hold your breath. Their website makes it clear (in so many words) that they’re all owned by the same family, and if the family doesn’t feel like building a location in your town, then tough noogies.
Here’s an interesting observation: In Illinois, if you want a White Castle you have to head for either the Chicago or St. Louis metro area, leading me to believe that WC operated principally in urban areas. Not so. Cross the border into Indiana and every dipshit little town on the map (at least, if it’s on the Interstate), has one.
Do not be fooled by those frozen things in the supermarket.
As I remember, if you’re lucky you gotta wait a couple minutes for your order to come off the grill.
There are at least two Chick Fil A’s* in OC–both the ones I know of being in Irvine. (One of those may actually be in Tustin). A third is apparently opening on the campus at UC Irvine.
The local ones don’t seem near as busy as they once were. I haven’t seen a new one in ages, either. But I don’t go there often.
Have you ever watched them assemble your burger? They take the patties, and other stuff, out of what looks like a steam cabinet. And I don’t smell or see anything that would make me think they even have a grill. I’m wondering if they use pre-cooked (and frozen) meats and then warm them in those steam thingies. The cheese doesn’t really even melt, and the burger is practically grease free.
Any employees out there? C’mon, fess up.
As a former employee, yes, yes, and yes. But the thing is that we (at least at my restaurant) had a timer on these warmers of 30 minutes. Corporate policy said that the burgers were supposed to be thrown away when the timers went off.
Needless to say, the timers were simply reset. I never knew of a burger to go in the trash unless it was still there at midnight after festering with germs for six hours and not even the stray dogs would eat it.
Boycott McD’s you say! They all do it… it’s terrible…
Say what you want about McDonalds, but back in the day (30-40 yrs ago?) they didn’t do stuff like that. The “corporate culture” actually cared about their product. For selfish reasons, sure, but it worked and the food was what it was advertised to be. I knew someone who had a shared ownership in one, and they got supplies from local sellers. Corporation had spies who would come unannounced and check the operation. Quality control was very strict. And they did time the food, and toss it at the end of that time. If you didn’t follow the rules, and there were many rules, you could lose your franchise. Franchises were hard to get, and very lucrative.
I wasn’t crazy about their burgers, but they were okay, and it was a good place to treat the kiddies, especially on a budget.
What a shame.
Burgerville USA is another regional that hasn’t expanded. It’s based in Vancouver WA, I believe, and they are all over Portland, western Oregon, and southwest Washington. And they’ve been that way for years, but never expanded even to Seattle. The closest they get to Seattle is Centralia, some 25 or so miles south of Olympia.
Hmm, checking the Burgerville Wiki page, I find
BTW, there used to be a Chick-fil-A in Beaverton OR here. Not sure if they’re still around or not, but the one I knew of is not there any more.
The Buffalo, New York area is known for having relatively few franchise and chain restaurants, especially upscale chains, compared to most metropolitan regions its size. When chains arrive, it’s usually after they’ve saturated the rest of the country. Natives will tell you it’s because residents are loyal to locally owned small businesses, which are more “real”, “authentic”, “genuine”, and so on, and thus being superior to the chains. Thus, the chains are afraid of the Buffalo market: the draw of established red-sauce-and-checkered-tablecloth hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants will keep the tables of Macaroni Grill empty.
I talked with restaurant site selection specialists, owners of commercial real estate, and others about this phenomenon. The reality is much different. When people ask “Why is there no P.F. Chang’s/Morton’s/J. Alexander/California Pizza Kitchen/etc in the area?”, the reasons generally are:
Margin of return. Chains generally open their first locations in areas where they feel they can make the most for their investment. It’s simply not enough to be profitable, but to be very profitable. If an upscale chain has $5,000,000 to spend on developing a new location, and a 20th location in the Los Angeles area will have a greater ROI than a location in a virgin market like Buffalo, they’ll pick LA yet again. The chains will only filter down to Buffalo when more profitable locations have been developed - which generally means the rest of the country.
Demographics. Chains prefer to locate in growing areas, where the pool of potential customers is growing., In Buffalo, it’s shrinking. In other stagnant metros such as Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh, there’s a large critical mass of high income households to keep new locations viable; in working-to-middle class Buffalo, it’s not the case. Chains often open in the smaller Rochester metro area long before they open in Buffalo, because there’s a large enough number of upper middle class households to make up for the slowly shrinking population.
Location within the region. Chain restaurants want to locate near areas where there is both a large professional employment base, driving lunch traffic, and a residential population in a 10-15 minute drive of the site. Buffalo’s suburbs don’t have the coherent edge cities that other regions have. There’s scattered office parks, but not enough in any one area to meet the site selection criteria most chains have; usually something like X amount of office workers making $50K+ during the day and X amount of households with $75K annual incomes within three miles of the site.
Appropriate venues. Buffalo doesn’t have any of the lifestyle center-type retail developments that new upscale chains prefer. They’re not going to locate on a pad site in a power center or conventional 1970s-style strip plaza; the “synergy” they seek on the site is lacking.
These reasons also apply somewhat to upscale retail chains, and many mid-end and fast food chains. Why is Whole Foods seemingly everywhere but Buffalo? Well, a Buffalo location might be profitable, but not as profitable as a 20th location in the Boston area.
The expanded Tim Horton’s presence in Ohio surely started after the 1995 merger with Wendy’s; see here for info. And of course Ohio is thick with Wendy’s restaurants, being headquartered just outside of Columbus. I’m not surprised the merger led to Tim Horton’s getting entrenched.
In the case of franchises, they need to have a critical mass in a given market in order to make media advertising worthwhile. So if there is a large gap in television coverage, or somesuch, then this may pose a barrier to starting a lone store beyond that coverage area.
Many small chains are NOT franchises, but are owned by a single family or group of investors. In this case they may find that thier expertise does not extend beyond a specific area, or they may want to keep the stores located so that a single bookkeeper, maintainance man, supply truck, etc. can make the rounds to all the stores.
Anicdote:
I know the principals of a very successful pizza chain that operates about a dozen stores around Albuquerque…even though they don’t serve beer, thier pie and sandwiches are that good. A few years ago they tried to expand out of state. They did some research and found a market that had the fewest per-capita family oriented resteraunts in the US, and a very large child-per-family ratio. It also had the single highest grossing Olive Garden resteraunt in the US…EXACTLY what they were looking for. The new store failed miserably. It seems that the large Mormon families in Salt Lake City, UT can’t afford to eat out often, and there is also an assumption that any pizza parlor would serve beer…or at least a belief that your neighbors will think that.
Dying chains often seem to have a few long-term surviving locations-often these survivors liger on for years. Take (for example) Howard Johnsons’s -a NE-based chain, which had restaurants all up and down the east coast. They died off years ago-except for a few locations-the last one (I think) was in Greedfield, MA-it closed when the owner died. Now, I can’t see how a defunct chain has any value-but maybe some older people remember the places with nostalgia. I wonder what happens if you are the owner of a franchise, and the parent company goes under-can you keep the name and operate indefinately?
They are so popular in RI that the big arena in Providence is called The Dunkin’ Donuts Center. I saw a lady with a DD iced coffee at church last Christmas Eve. People bring DD iced coffees everywhere in RI - even to their jobs at Starbuck’s. There are three I can walk to from work, 4 within a 10 minute drive from my home. I fully expect to come down to the kitchen one morning to find that there’s one open there. I just hope I have panties on.
Speaking of Dunkin’ Donuts, iced coffee and panties, I’m pretty sure everyone in RI has come close to, if not actually accomplished, pooping their pants after one of those iced coffees. Or so I hear.
Some restaurant chains use regional distribution centers for their inventory. The trucks loads up in the wee hours of the morning at the distribution center and head out. The intent is to make it to each location within the day and then back to the distribution center. Moving into a new regional area could mean needing the critical mass/number of locations to support a new distribution center.
For In-N-Out, it is indeed the supply chain. All their locations are currently within one day’s drive of their bakery and meat processing plant. Until they fill the area with that radius, they have no real incentive to expand farther. It would mean making a new supply point, with a lot of cost, and then you effectively have oversupply because there’s no way to open enough new locations to use the full capacity. I suppose eventually this will happen, but they only have about 130 or so locations, so I suspect they’re planning on staying in this area for a good while yet.
There’s one in Santa Ana, on the corner of MacArthur and Bristol, just North of South Coast Plaza. It’s next to an In’N’Out Burger. There was an article recently (I think it was in the OC Register) of some “Fast Food Maven” noting that the Chick-Fil-A restaurants she knew of in this area were all placed near to an In’N’Out Burger, and wondering if they were purposely competing for the christian crowd (Chick-Fil-A and In’N’Out Burger supposedly both print Bible verses on some of their paper items like drink cups or french fry holders.)
Reminded by elmwood’s post.
I went to the Anchor Bar, of wing fame, in Buffalo and they were busy both times. And don’t let anyone tell you it’s all tourists, either. There are clones here and there, including one in San Rafel, CA. Good stuff, and no different from the original imo. I mean, it’s not rocket science. But I can see why they wouldn’t do so well as a large chain.
Want to see who’s local? Holler out “Anybody know the way to New York?” Then run like hell.
Anyway, I had fun at the Anchor Bar. And some good wings. The “suicide” sauce is way too hot, though. She did give me a sample to warn me away and it worked.
Good livers, too.
Skip the falls and go to the Grand Canyon instead.
