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It is lunchtime in Garner, N.C., and Ted Fowler has just filled his plate at the food bar in a local restaurant when a casually dressed chap in his 60s approaches him. Before Fowler has a chance to say hello, the fellow is explaining how much he and his wife love the restaurant and how they eat there all the time and how the company shouldn't change a thing about the place. "That's what customers keep telling us about the new restaurants," Fowler only too happily declares once the man walks back to his table. Still, he's confused: how'd this guy know he was company president?
Twenty-four hours earlier Bill and Joyce Hanekamp are sitting with a franchise official in a similar restaurant twenty-five miles away in Durham. The middle-aged couple is checking out chains as they drive from city to city. A year ago, Bill sold the four Taco Bells he operated for ten years in Tampa, Fla. Now, he says, they're looking for another foodservice franchise.
Their aim is to operate a popular concept in the friendly, family-dining segment. Their reason: consumers are increasingly value-conscious. "It's where an operator has to be in the 1990s," Bill insists.
Bill has few objections about the unit he's been examining for two hours; indeed, he's impressed. "The restaurant is laid out efficiently, the food isn't complicated to fix, and for the dollar customers won't get anything as good anywhere else," he says flatly.
The recipient of all this praise is the reincarnated Golden Corral, a sprawling steak, buffet, and bakery concept. Golden Corral Corp. has erected 26 of the 10,000-square-foot outlets since introducing a prototype in Lawton, Okla., on March 21, 1988. All are company-operated, though not for long. The Raleigh, N.C.-based chain is eagerly franchising the large restaurants--or what the company calls its Metro Market unit.
The stores in Durham and Garner are spacious, to say the least. Encompassing roughly 90,000 square feet, the outlets offer plenty of parking and good visibility. Their bright red logos--on Route 70 in Garner and on Roxboro Road in Durham--are hard to miss.
It's also apparently hard to drive by them, to which jammed parking lots and crowded dining rooms readily attest. Prices are part of the reason....