“From Beloved Beacon to Forgotten Relic: Unraveling the Astonishing Decline of Howard Johnson’s Empire”
Fast-forwarding to the next century, various businesses, some of which are still around today, started exploring the franchise model. One of the largest early adopters of the model was Harper Method Hair Parlour in 1891, started by one Martha Harper who’d worked as a domestic servant from the age of 7 to 32, at which point she used her life’s savings of $360 (about $12,000 today) to start the first Harper Method Hair Parlour, which set the model for what most salons after would soon copy. In particular, she began training other poor domestic servants in her trade and then allowing these women to franchise her model, brand, and product lines with huge success, rapidly growing to some 500 locations in the company’s over century long run. Other early modern franchise pioneers included the likes of General Motors and Coca Cola. However, with regards to restaurants, the idea was still quite novel and mostly untested. So while Howard Johnson didn’t invent the idea, as is often claimed, it was Johnson who was about to put the entire business model in the spotlight in a major way, and see countless restaurant chains afterwards copy him to worldwide success.
Going back to his second location, unable to get a loan and lacking the capital thanks to the Great Depression, in 1932 Johnson reached out to a friend of his, Reginald Sprague, whose father owned a primely located tract of land near the water in Orleans, Massachusetts. Johnson thus pitched the idea of Sprague opening a Howard Johnson’s restaurant there with Sprague paying for everything on the restaurant side, but getting to use Howard Johnson’s brand and reasonably successful restaurant template and product, including his extremely popular ice cream. In exchange, Howard Johnson would get a cut of the sales.
