04-24-2008, 03:42 PM
I think Wendy's has been floundering a bit since the passing of its founder, Dave Thomas, in 2002. Not sure why, but the product changes just seem to be more of a follow the latest trend the last few years. In one interview of him, he said he liked to put out sandwiches that he would like to eat. I guess his taste matched mine a lot of the time. It also seems a number of the franchisees have not done a good job of keeping up their operations.
Case in that vein was the former franchise holder for the stores here in Western Mass. Formerly an attorney for Wendy's corporate offices in Dublin, Ohio, he bought up a total of 13 stores here. But he never spent anything more than he had to on equipment upgrades and furnishings. So, for instance, the local store had an POS/order system that was put in over 10 years ago, the last several years had frequent failures. If the store had not had a number of counter persons who could do orders and cashiering with pencil and paper would have had to just close. But the slow orders when it was down slowly drove away customers. He ended up closing all stores last summer suddenly when he stopped paying his bills for product and they stopped shipping any more food to his stores. A couple months before that one of his lenders started foreclosure proceedings on 5 stores whose purchase had been funded by a their loan to him. He is currently facing criminal charges for issuing employee paychecks that bounced. Wendy's did manage to acquire 11 of the locations in the foreclosure proceedings by another lender or through having a partial ownership. Most need major renovations, one will be torn down and rebuilt. So far 2 or 3 have been re-opened, closest to me is 20 miles away, though only a few miles from where I work.
Case in that vein was the former franchise holder for the stores here in Western Mass. Formerly an attorney for Wendy's corporate offices in Dublin, Ohio, he bought up a total of 13 stores here. But he never spent anything more than he had to on equipment upgrades and furnishings. So, for instance, the local store had an POS/order system that was put in over 10 years ago, the last several years had frequent failures. If the store had not had a number of counter persons who could do orders and cashiering with pencil and paper would have had to just close. But the slow orders when it was down slowly drove away customers. He ended up closing all stores last summer suddenly when he stopped paying his bills for product and they stopped shipping any more food to his stores. A couple months before that one of his lenders started foreclosure proceedings on 5 stores whose purchase had been funded by a their loan to him. He is currently facing criminal charges for issuing employee paychecks that bounced. Wendy's did manage to acquire 11 of the locations in the foreclosure proceedings by another lender or through having a partial ownership. Most need major renovations, one will be torn down and rebuilt. So far 2 or 3 have been re-opened, closest to me is 20 miles away, though only a few miles from where I work.