“From Beloved Beacon to Forgotten Relic: Unraveling the Astonishing Decline of Howard Johnson’s Empire”
Just 5 years after the war’s end, the company was back at over 200 locations, and grossing a new company record of $115 million that year, or about $1.4 billion today. Or, to put it another way, in modern dollars each location averaging about $7 million per year in gross sales. Three years later, they were up to 400 locations spanning 32 states, about 1 in 4 of which were at turnpikes, which were the most profitable of all locations.
Things only got even better when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, nation changing legislation spurring the creation of the United States interstate system in 1956. Within a little over a decade of this, Howard Johnson’s had ballooned to over 1,000 locations and was at this point second only to the United States military in the country for number of meals served annually to people outside of the home.
Leading up to this peak, Howard Johnson also saw that by jumping into the hotel industry, he could double down on things, and thus he began the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodges in 1954, often placed right next to his restaurant locations. In the Motor Lodges, he also followed the model of what you got at one Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, is exactly what you’d find at any of them. So, for the road weary traveler, they could now stop not just for a familiar home-cooked style dinner, but could also find a consistent, quality place to sleep for the night too.
By 1965 near the company’s peak, while fast-food upstarts like McDonalds were also rapidly rising, in McDonald’s case with now some 700 locations, Howard Johnson’s company gross sales were still more than the upstarts in McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC combined.
