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Thomas didn’t just know how to cook a good hamburger; he single-handedly revolutionized the fast food industry. He didn’t want to be just another fast-food joint; he wanted to create the type of old-fashioned family restaurant that he had dined in so many times with his father and he wanted to serve quality food.
Thomas never saw himself as a part of the fast food business. He hated the label ‘fast food’ and instead saw Wendy’s as a “quick-service restaurant.” He wanted to give his customers quality and not just speed and convenience. Thomas was soon leading the industry in product innovations. His first groundbreaking move was to use fresh, not frozen, ground beef for his hamburgers. At a time when all of his competitors were mass-producing their food, this was a welcome innovation for the public. He also decided to make square patties, instead of the regular circle shape, claiming that at Wendy’s, “We don’t cut corners.”
Fresh hamburgers were not the only unique feature on the menus at Wendy’s. In 1979, Wendy’s became the first national chain to introduce salad bars, which was part of Thomas’ attempt to serve both delicious and fresh and healthy food. . In 1983, Wendy’s added baked potatoes to the menu, which have since become one of their bestsellers. Later, the company also introduced the 0.99-cent Super Value Meal, fresh carryout salads and spicy chicken sandwiches.
In 1971, Wendy’s became home to the country’s first Pick-Up Window. While other restaurants had made attempts to institute a drive-up window, none had as of yet been able to make it work successfully. Thomas had originally intended the window to simply be an addition to the building in order to generate a few extra dollars in sales, but it would soon become a mainstay of restaurant chains industry-wide.
The innovations didn’t stop there. In 1979, Thomas came up with another original idea – he would franchise the Wendy’s concept. While the notion of franchising was not unique in and of itself, Thomas approached it from a different angle. He chose to sell franchises for entire cities and regions, rather than as single units. This was yet another industry breakthrough and one that enabled the company to open up a significant number of restaurants in a short period of time: 1,000 in the company’s first 100 months.
The interior design of the company also set it apart from its competitors. Thomas had wanted his restaurants to have an old-fashioned atmosphere and they were thus fashioned with carpeted dining rooms, Bentwood chairs, Tiffany-style lamps and newsprint tabletops – all of which were extremely novel for their time. Wendy’s took on the homey feeling just as Thomas had envisioned, which helped the chain stand out against its fast-food-only competitors.
It was by being bold and daring enough to steer his business in different directions that Thomas was able to make Wendy’s the international success it has become today. He tested the waters, pushed the boundaries, and was all the more triumphant because of it.
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“Many persons are always kept poor, because they are too visionary,” Barnum said. “Every project looks to them like certain successes, and therefore they keep changing from one business to another, always in hot wat...
