It started as a big pile of bricks next to the Starbucks on Manchester Road in Rock Hill, Missouri right outside of St. Louis. Three times a week I drove past it as the building slowly took shape. It started looking more recognizable as each day passed. Just a couple of days ago, they put the smiling-faced little red haired girl in blue stripes on the side of the building. Look out McDonald’s and Burger King, Wendys is back in town.
They’ve been a long time gone with a promise to return and now they are back. I worked for Wendys in one capacity or another pretty much since they started in St. Louis way back in 1979 until they closed. At first they were a subsidiary of DavCo, one of the very first Wendys franchises. DavCo also owned Crystal Hamburgers, a White Castle-like hamburger chain scattered throughout the south.
After many years in St. Louis, DavCo had grown to some 53 restaurants. But they had never made any money. DavCo then sold the franchise to a used car dealer named Harold Arbeitman. He also owned a couple of Holiday Inns over in Illinois and a Chrysler dealership in Ellisville. He and his wife used to come into the Ellisville Wendys and get chicken sandwiches about three times a week. Harold knew absolutely nothing about the business of selling hamburgers.
The first thing he did was fire about 32 of the senior management leaving the stores in the hands of $8.00/hr. Shift leaders. Then he hired some of the local furniture and appliance dealers known for their wacky TV commercials. It might have worked for selling refrigerators but not burgers and fries.
Harold soon ran the company into the ground and then died in a tragic helicopter accident downtown and DavCo had to come back and take over what was left under the aegis of Midwest DavCo Foods. After a couple of years they turned around and sold the company to an outfit that owned several Pizza Huts. At least they were in the restaurant business.
Despite all their efforts, sales kept going down. Pretty soon they were closing stores right and left. Bills went unpaid and vendors were left hanging. At times the stores didn’t even have heat in the winter because of unpaid bills. Finally, the company went bankrupt about 8 years ago. Wendys International, the parent company that Dave Thomas founded back in 1969, wanted to start building stores again in St. Louis, an important market in the Midwest, but right at that time, they themselves were in the middle of an upheaval and were threatening to sell.
So for a long time St. Louis went Wendy-less. Wendys International finally came back into the market a couple of years ago with a new store in Florissant, but that was it. Had the effort to reestablish St. Louis as a viable market fizzled already?
But now, even in this bad economy they’ve opened their second restaurant. I wish them well.
