“From Beloved Beacon to Forgotten Relic: Unraveling the Astonishing Decline of Howard Johnson’s Empire”
As for the restaurant side, the now extremely dated menu, a growing reputation for poor quality food and service, and the expense and inconvenience vs the rising stars in fast food all combined were continuing to sink the brand.
So why did Marriott buy it when they clearly had no interest in fixing any of this? Well, as Ray Krock of McDonald’s so astutely pointed out during a speech at the University of Texas in 1974, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not in the hamburger business. My business is real estate.”
Marriott simply wanted the locations themselves to convert to more profitable Big Boy and other fast food locations, as well as to add all the Burger King locations Howard Johnson’s owned to their own portfolio. And so it was that within two years of their acquisition, Marriott had made almost all of the company owned locations disappear, leaving only a subset of the franchised locations untouched to die a slow and agonizing death.
To try to turn things around, the remaining location owners created the Franchise Associates Incorporated, with its chairman noting in 1987, “We have the concept, but it desperately needs to be modernized, internally and externally. Howard Johnson was allowed to become tired and stale. We must get rid of that plastic image… Anything can be salvageable if a great deal of time and money and effort is put in it. And Howard Johnson needs all those same things.”
Unfortunately for them, they were never able to expand from here outside of one single Howard Johnsons’ ice cream shop in Puerto Rico. They did briefly in 1990 debut a prototype remodel of Howard Johnson’s in Canton, Massachusetts, but the location and changes proved to be a dud. Further efforts were made to modernize the menu, with likewise no success.
