The Resurrection Of Hardee's And The Demise Of Happy Chef

Growing up in the Upper Midwest in the 1980s, two food franchises that were front and center in my childhood memories were Hardee's and Happy Chef.  Throughout the 80s, the franchises were ascendant, with new stores popping up in new towns and replacing closed restaurants in communities that already had Hardee's and Happy Chef franchises.  They were on top of the world and even though I enjoyed them both, I took them for granted given how prolific they were.  By the second half of the 1990s, both franchises began to fall on hard times that lasted the better part of a decade for Hardee's and followed Happy Chef to its extinction.  I'll track the rise and fall of both franchises in the paragraphs ahead and offer some personal anecdotes on my associations with both of them and my opinions on what went wrong.

I'll start with Happy Chef to get the one with the unhappy ending out of the way.  The franchise started in 1963 in Mankato, Minnesota, with a single casual dining 24-hour restaurant in the vein of Perkins and Denny's.  In the quarter century to come, the franchise boomed to 56 restaurants in the Upper Midwest. While it might seem odd to an outsider why such a restaurant would have such visceral appeal to a young child as I was in the 1980s, anybody who grew up in the area will know exactly why Happy Chef brings back such fond memories for me.......the statues!  Larger-than-life ceramic statues of a nicely dressed chef holding a giant wooden spoon over his head dotted the landscape off of freeway exits throughout the region, and millions of children probably have their own memories of tugging on dad's shoulder and requesting he pull off the road and stop for breakfast at the restaurant with the big chef statue.  And best of all, he spoke!  With the push of a button at the statue's base, the chef would read you the specials for the day and often relayed some quirky prerecorded anecdotes to boot.   Was the food as impressive as the presentation?  Definitely not.  I remember having some good omelets and pancakes over the years at Happy Chef but also remember some greasy, overpriced drivel coming out of that Happy Chef kitchen, particularly in the later years.

And ultimately, Happy Chef's mid-to-late 80s expansion was when it fell victim to hubris.  I surmise that the Happy Chef empire up to that point was built on the statue gimmick, but the new Happy Chefs going up all over the region were going up sans the statues.  It was blasphemous, and I know I'm not the only young diner who no longer had any use for a roadside Happy Chef restaurant if there wasn't a statue accompanying it.  Making matters worse, a lot of existing Happy Chefs started taking their chef statues down, citing maintenance hassles particularly with the audio recordings.  It was pure arrogance, and not coincidentally the franchise's decline began shortly thereafter with a slow drip of closures throughout the 1990s that accelerated in the 2000s.  Around 2008 there were only seven Happy Chefs left.  A few years later they were down to three.  And as of September 2015, there's one left....the original Happy Chef in Mankato, Minnesota.....and not coincidentally the only one that kept their giant chef statue up over the years.

Just last winter when going Christmas shopping in Mankato, I stopped by Happy Chef and got a couple of photos of the statue for my own files and to amuse coworkers who also have fond memories of the old Happy Chef statues.  Good thing I got the photos when I did because earlier this summer the brother of the original owner announced he's putting the restaurant up for sale.  By year's end, the restaurant will likely be under different ownership and the final statue will likely be removed, ideally to be put in some museum.  The blame for the extinction of Happy Chef is largely being directed towards "changing consumer tastes", but I'm calling bullshit.  Happy Chef had one of the best promotional gimmicks around in their heyday but made the decision to squander that competitive advantage at the peak of their popularity. Consumer tastes didn't change so much as the youngest customers who got families in the front door in the first place no longer had any compelling reason to visit Happy Chef.  By such hubris does an empire fall.

But not every story of decline lacks a redemptive follow-up chapter.  The fast food franchise Hardee's was about as low as a franchise could go a decade ago but is in the middle stages of an extremely impressive comeback in 2015.  I didn't even realize back in the 1980s that Hardee's was a regional chain centered in the Midwest and Southern states.  I just assumed it was right in there with other top-tier national fast food chains like McDonald's and Burger King.  I always liked the food a lot better than McDonald's and, much like with Happy Chef, was taken in by their promotional gimmicks, which frequently included free stuffed animals with the purchase of a combo meal or, most memorably, the 1983 Smurf' glass sets.  But my personal association with Hardee's grew stronger in the summer of 1990 when I accompanied my dad doing vinyl repair work at car lots throughout southwest Minnesota, and we discovered that Hardee's was often times the only fast food option in most of the smaller towns in the region.  An order of nine of their Chicken Tenders with barbecue sauce was all I needed to get through most afternoons on the road.  Even as an adult, my commutes to college and my weekend road trips have included dozens of visits to the Hardee's drive-thrus and the purchase of one of their always-delicious chicken sandwiches.

There was a definite Hardee's boom in the second half of the 80s with new restaurants popping up everywhere, but the boom stopped abruptly in the first half of the 90s and was followed by a precipitous decline that may have been very close to becoming fatal.  I first began to notice the closure of some Hardee's around 1997, along with rumors of wider problems within the franchise.  By 2001, the store closures really began to ramp up and just kept coming until around 2007 when the bleeding finally began to stop, with the state of Minnesota getting hit particularly hard.  At its peak, there were more than 150 Hardee's locations in Minnesota alone, but by 2008 they were down to 24.  Somehow, the Hardee's in the south side ghetto of my hometown of Albert Lea was one of the 24 to persevere even through the worst years.  Hardee's acknowledged its problems around 2000 and changed its marketing and its menu.  I remember a wide array of clever advertising from Hardee's going back to when I was a little kid but it became edgier in the new millennium.  Ultimately though, the food itself was what made the comeback stick....

Hardee's was never thought to have had very good burgers in its 80s heyday, and having a few over the years I can see where its critics are coming from, but since I primarily feasted on their chicken or roast beef I didn't really notice.  But they made a conscious effort to serve thicker patties of higher quality beef along with some additional menu upgrades.  Contrary to my dad's clueless assertion that "they're never gonna make a comeback by raising their prices", Hardee's appears to have done just that as they are definitely resurgent again and have been since around 2010.  They were down to one restaurant in the Des Moines area but now have four.  All of the Hardee's in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, closed more than a decade ago but now there are at least two new ones.  Smaller cities in Minnesota where Hardee's had previously closed--such as Fairmont and Austin--are now reopening Hardee's stores.  And I couldn't be happier about it as it's always been one of my favorite--and most storied--fast food options.  I'm not sure we're likely to see the return of the small-town Hardee's stores I remembered as a boy that were some of the first to close, which is unfortunate, but then again their comeback options seem rather limitless at this stage with as much turf as they've already reclaimed.

Next week I'll be driving home from Duluth on Minnesota State Highway 23 after a weekend on the North Shore of Lake Superior and I already know my lunch choice will be Hardee's.  And I'll have five options to boot as Highway 23 has Hardee's in Hinckley, Mora, Milaca, Cold Spring, and Granite Falls.....assuming they haven't reopened one in another town on the highway as well!

The Donald Trump Phenomenon: An Accumulation of 50 Years Worth of Republican Party Cynicism

Like just about everybody else who follows politics, I would not have anticipated three months ago that Donald Trump would come to dominate the political discussion for the summer, surge way ahead in the polls amongst a very crowded field, and suck all the oxygen out of the room for most other candidates.  But that was primarily because I didn't know what kind of campaign he was gonna run.  Had I known three months ago what I know now, it wouldn't have been nearly as surprising.  Here we have one of the 100 richest men in America running a full-throated populist campaign railing against everything from illegal immigration to the Chinese eating our lunch in the global economy to America's political leaders being bought and paid for by, well, by guys like him.  And the fact that he talks about these issues with the trademark Trump swagger and brash self-confidence only makes him more appealing to the demographic he's going for....a demographic that the Republican Party co-opted more than two generations ago that has now come to represent a majority in their party while the establishment was napping.

Minnesota's Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty coined a term in 2005 that seemed on-point then and has only gotten more fitting in the decade since.....that Republicans are no longer "the party of the country club but are the party of Sam's Club".  In the 1950s, predicting voting patterns in America was pretty easy.  If you were a low-income worker in Texas or a poor farmer living in a shack with a dirt floor in Alabama, you were a Democrat.  And if you were a young professional on Long Island or a business manager in southern California, you were a Republican.  To a much greater degree than today, people voted their pocketbooks.  But then came the civil rights battle and other culture wars of the 1960s that dragged on into the 1970s and flipped America's voting coalitions on their head.  Richard Nixon and the Republican Party, with Reagan after him, successfully employed a "Southern strategy" that co-opted culturally conservative southern Democrats into the GOP tent.  By 1980, the new recruits along with the old-school money interests of the Republican Party combined to form a majority and conservatism was ascendant.

The quarter century that followed saw a shakeup amongst the "country club" crowd, however, as large chunks of their ranks drifted to the left on the same cultural issues that the GOP won over the "Sam's Cub" crowd with.  It would have been unthinkable in the 1970s that 30 years later, the steel mill towns of southwest Pennsylvania would be Republican while the upscale suburban donut encircling Philadelphia would be Democrat, but that's exactly what has happened in that very local example and across the country.  Cycle after cycle, the blue-collar whites that Republicans spent the 60s, 70s, and 80s co-opting into the Republican Party orbit based on a growing litany of cultural resentments became a larger and larger share of the party's base.  In 2012, every fourth-rate contender in the weakest Republican Presidential field in decades was given a serious hearing by the party's primary electorate--halfwits like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum and nutjobs like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich all had their time in the sun--before primary voters finally realized they were unelectable and then held their nose and voted for establishment choice Mitt Romney only after all other options were exhausted.  That cycle foreshadowed the Trump surge we're seeing four years later, only Trump has far more media savvy and staying power than those clowns ever had, which is why he is dominating the field to the degree that he has.

It would seem as though 2016 is the year that the inmates have officially taken over the asylum in the Republican Party.  It seems hard for me to believe that a businessman like Trump agrees with his own overheated rhetoric on immigration and sticking it to China in the global economy, but he recognizes that that's where the center of gravity is now in the Republican Party.  For decades, the party has relied upon the foot soldiers in trailer parks and small impoverished towns throughout the South and the heartland for enough votes to win on election day, at which point the party graybeards would proceed with their real agenda of transferring wealth from that same peasantry to the top of the income pyramid, only stirring the pot of the culture war again before elections to make sure their soldiers will deliver for them yet again.  But with the combination of changing demographics in the country and the moneyed class discovering they can get the same special protections with Democrats without the cultural intolerance, the Republicans are finding that all they have left are angry white guys in the South and the heartland whose Republican identity is entirely defined by their cultural resentments.  And on the issues that matter most to establishment types like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, these voters really don't have a vested interest.

Enter Donald Trump, who is taking positions on bread and butter issues that likely have Ronald Reagan spinning in his grave, including a higher minimum wage, protectionist tariffs, high taxes on the rich, and single-payer health care.  To your average Republican base voter earning $25,000 a year in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who favors Republicans based on issues like guns, abortion, immigration, and sticking it to "welfare cheats", none of Trump's left-populist economic posturing is particularly troubling.  After all, most of these guys are from families a generation or two removed from being New Deal and JFK Democrats based on the same left-populist economic posturing coming out of Trump.  They're just not "conservatives" in the Reagan tradition no matter how much historical rewriting has been done to lionize Reagan and his policy positions.  Mike Huckabee had success in 2008 running on a softer version of this platform as did Rick Santorum in 2012, but these guys never had the salesmanship or media platform that Trump now has to consolidate this white working class base.

Like everybody else, I figured early on that Trump would fade rather quickly, but that certainly hasn't happened.  I'm about 50-50 on whether it will at this point.  I think even among the flag-waving populist crowd, they may take a step back as the primary vote approaches and ask themselves if they really believe this guy is capable of winning a general election.  And chances are, his shtick will be wearing thin by then.  Some believe Trump's not even really running and is merely on a high-stakes ego trip, and will pull out of the race before the voting starts assuring everybody he "could have and would have won".  All those scenarios are plausible, and collectively perhaps more plausible than him winning the nomination.  In a way, Trump's rise has been a very useful reminder to those in elite circles in both parties and the media of the magnitude of the cultural tribal lines that already exist in this country that are poised to get much worse as the population continues to diversify.  The idea of him getting anywhere near the White House is terrifying at any number of levels, but if Trump's candidacy is nothing more than an "art project" exposing the fault lines in American political and cultural life today while simultaneously getting a well-deserved jab in at the perils of our corrupt campaign finance system, then Donald Trump will go down as the best thing that happened to American politics in 2015.