Carl's Jr. screwed up in TX by opening new units in Dallas/Houston initially as corporate operated units. At the time the Carl's Jr. corporate operated program ran very strong stores. Their pricing was "in line" (they were competitive with McDonalds at their corporate units), they had long hours, and were well staffed in the corporate units. Then the company went into a refranchising program a few years after the openings in TX; the stores were not performing particularly well anyway, but since it was a growth market, they were able to package them up as nearly new stores in a hot growing market and find some franchise group to take the markets over. The stores were taken over by franchisees and you know the rest of the story. Prices get increased, labor gets cut, operations that were just being built up to have customer loyalty fell drastically downhill, and of course the locations didn't last long.pseudo3d wrote: ↑June 7th, 2023, 8:41 pm
There used to be stand-alone Quiznos, but the buildings tended to be pretty old (never purpose-built) and I can't think of any examples off-hand that still exist.
Carl's Jr. made a big splash in 2009 in Texas with new stores, and early stores even had the Green Burrito co-brand. By the end of 2020, nearly all of them had closed (there's still on Georgetown and the truck stop co-brands still exist). The one time I tried it I waited a long time for a hamburger...then again, Whataburger tends to have poor service and they're one of the most popular places around.
The truck stop units are under a different sort of agreement as they are non-traditional units. Love's is typically running those sites. They are about the only party doing much of any growth at this point with the Carl's Jr./Hardees brands. Those sites aren't impacted by the franchisee failure. As long as the sites perform, Love's will keep them going even as the only units for hundreds of miles.
Back to the Quiznos topic, most of the ones I saw were strip malls and new construction units were usually those little parking lot type strips near or shared by a Starbucks since at the time the two chains were building out heavily.
I am not sure how the attempted revival of Quiznos is going. The original store in Denver closed or is about to close, it was corporate and refranchised a couple years ago (refranchising.............same old story)... but Quiznos never had many corporate units just those few around Denver.