I will put up a new blog in a bit..............in the mean time I ran across this tidbit of info on Minnie Pearl that you might enjoy:
Fried Chicken Fiasco Didn’t Tarnish Star’s Good Name
It seems
reasonable that Minnie Pearl’s persona should be able to sell fried chicken,
right?
After all
the Centerville, Tennessee, native Sarah “Minnie Pearl” Cannon was, for her
time, a country comedy phenomenon. With her frilly country dresses and straw
hats adorned with colorful flowers and a $1.98 price tag hanging from its rim,
Cannon spent 50 years on the Grand Ole Opry beginning in 1940. In 1969 she
carried her humor to television as a regular on “Hee Haw,” where yet another
generation of fans would come to know and love her.
So, when
former Democratic gubernatorial nominee John Jay Hooker Jr., a charismatic and
somewhat eccentric Nashville attorney, conceived of a fast-food chain called
Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chicken, it seemed like a natural fit.
To Hooker
it must have appeared that Kentucky Fried Chicken was an overnight success. In
reality “Colonel” Harlan Sanders had begun selling his specialty fried chicken
out of the back of his gas station in the 1930s and began franchising it in
1952 with 600 locations by 1964. When Nashville businessman, Jack Massey, and
Louisville lawyer, John Y. Brown, purchased the Kentucky Fried Chicken empire
from Sanders for a mere $2 million dollars, it saw immediate and very lucrative
growth that launched it into the international, multibillion dollar company it
has become.
Hooker and
his law partner and brother, Henry Hooker, convinced Cannon, an educated,
intelligent woman despite her simpleton comedic character, that if Colonel
Sanders could sell fried chicken, they could sell more.
The
Hookers admitted they knew nothing about cooking and had never run a
restaurant, yet they were so optimistic about the future of Minnie Pearl’s
Fried Chicken that they projected the franchise would have 500 stores by 1970.
Politicians, activists, and investors purchased stock at $.50 to $1 a share in
faith that the Hooker brothers knew what they were doing. Soon there were 300
franchises, and the stock value soared. Investors became millionaires.
“It’s
going to be fun for me,” Cannon reportedly said, but that was going to prove
very untrue.
The
Hookers took the company public in 1968, but the accounting method they
used with regard to franchise fees and stock value, though allegedly an
accepted practice at the time, drew the attention three years later of the
Securities Exchange Commission, which launched an investigation to
determine if the company had engaged in any criminal wrongdoing.
“If the
food does not agree with the people who are supposed to patronize all these
outlets, then Minnie Pearl’s will find itself with a balance sheet full of
deserted buildings,” Fortune Magazine stated in a prophetic October
1968 review.
To make
matters worse, in early 1969 there were only 40 restaurants open, 100 under
construction and 300 under development. Customers did not like the taste of the
chicken nor the fact that taste and quality was inconsistent.
The
Hookers changed the company name to Performance Systems Inc. and by March 1969
had sold hundreds of new franchises in an attempt to grow the company and
recoup some of the early losses. The menu was expanded to include pizza and
roast beef. Nonetheless, PSI lost $5.5 million during the first half of
1969.
Finally,
the SEC’s investigation found that the company had filed financial statements
that were false, rewriting the company’s 1968 annual report to show that the
company lost $1.2 million rather than earned $3.2 million. A class-action
lawsuit was filed by PSI’s shareholders, but they only recovered a small
portion of what they invested. By 1974, the stock was less than a quarter a
share. It was all over by the end of the ‘70s.
Cannon was
completely cleared of all wrongdoing, but she was embarrassed that the name of
her beloved Minnie Pearl character was associated with one of the restaurant
industry’s legendary fiascos.
This
copyrighted story by Sasha Dunavant was originally published in Country Reunion
Magazine and Country Reunion News.
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