This sounds like some 80's öööö. Early 90's at the latest. Hot dogs seem to have been relegated to the ballpark and the backyard for a long while now. Even A&W doesn't exist anywhere near Atlanta, you have to reach Tennessee or the southern half of Florida just to get a chili cheese shake.
Literal gifts from God don't count.
Nineties or the Noughts. He had that deer in the headlights look of someone on a Lost Mission with a pregnant wife as the Questgiver.
Back in said 80s, I worked in CNN Center and there was a guy who owned one of the fast food places (his name was Wes and it wasn't a chain - it was his only restaurant) on the ground floor. His specialty was Chicago dogs. He even had big shaker of Overdog celery salt next to the condiments.
For you.
I met @BranMart by accident in a Starbucks once. The one day of 2018 I forgot to wear a mask and he just happened to be there.
And the girls are still scarred.
I'd say you're right.
We had one at Arbor Place Mall's food court in my hometown when it initially opened in 1999. It stuck around for a few years and was gone, I assume around the same time they vacated the rest of the state. We also had a Philly Connection in Douglasville back when those were still a little more common. I thought they were all gone as well, but discovered last year that there was one somewhere in Marietta and decided to give it a try. I was pretty surprised by how good it was. Probably shaved a few days off my life, but it was good. I still get their commercial jingle from the early 90's stuck in my head sometimes.
No, that was a franchisee going under. The upside of having small, local ownership is the ability to build community connections, effective local marketing, and ownership who cares about the customer experience. The downside is that the owners are less financially stable and more prone to failure if the store underperforms.
I didn't think they'd been that heavily composed of franchises yet back then. Were they ever primarily corporate in the vein of McDonalds and their ilk, or has it always been like that? I'm wondering now if Long John Silver is doing the same thing, because they're apparently now ~80% franchisees and much fewer and far between than they once were. But they also have locations like Acworth, which is a far cry from White House, TN.
This is bizarre. Why is the process so convoluted? Seems like something they could have streamlined at some point, especially once they started running into financial trouble.
