It’s like the Tooth Fairy just up and quit to become a stripper. People sell wrenches where proud buffets once steamed, as if they didn’t have a crucial impact on so many childhoods for the better part of a decade. There are Verizon stores and Sbarros in old Pizza Huts. Today, many of the trademark red roofs are pitched atop non-pizza businesses. Pizza Hut was headed toward consolidation. The problem was that unlimited pizza, pasta, and salad were no match for simultaneous trend away from buffets. They wanted to advertise having the best pizza and then they wanted to serve it at the continental breakfast from hell. But Pizza Hut dug in its stuffed, crusty heels. The idea was that buffets would supercharge dine-in growth alongside delivery growth.īy 1999, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. “You cannot have one asset that is flat or growing very slowly and have the entire company growing very rapidly,” senior vice president of marketing for PepsiCo Bob Perkins, told the New York Times in 1992. Did it help the executive pull in more customers? Hard to say. Did it make Pizza Hut more successful? No. Some 2,000 14-foot, all-you-can-eat buffets were installed across America.ĭid the experiment in buffet technology work? It depends on what metric you privilege. So, naturally, Pizza Hut doubled down on dining in. The year before the business had grown by 10 percent, but due to increased delivery sales. The buffets made their debut early in the summer of 1992. As the company expanded, the recognizable red, shingled roofs proliferated across the country. The name reportedly came from Dan’s wife who thought the first lazily construction location looked like a hut. The first ever Pizza Hut was open by brothers Dan and Frank Carney in Wichita, Kansas in 1958. For the low price of $3.99 - $1.99 for anyone under the age of 10 - a nutrient-agnostic diner could have it all. At that time, Pizza Hut was a freewheeling, come-as-you-are-at-your-worst sort of place best understood in terms of the proximity of the pizza to the pudding. Where I’m from, the proud and intermittently trashy state of Illinois, they were a pre-Seamless staple and an excuse to visit the red-roofed sanctuary that was America’s foremost pseudo-Italian food franchise. All-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffets were by far the best thing to happen to pizzas, buffets, and anyone who didn’t care about their bodies in the 1990s.
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