This week, as we wrote about a default judgment in a two-year-old case between Corner Bakery and Boston Market, we decided to check in on the number of locations the latter chain was down to.
We’re pretty sure the number is six, the number listed on the company’s website. We called all six to verify and got answers from three of them. Two didn’t answer the phone. One was a busy signal.
Whether it’s three, five, or six, that is not many, not for a chain that once had 1,200 locations and was a theoretical pioneer in the entire fast-casual movement. That means 99.5% of the chain’s locations have closed over the past 28 years.
It’s a sad decline, particularly in the Maze household, which has not had access to one of the chain’s locations since it abandoned the Minnesota market seven years ago. But it takes a lot to undo a 1,200-unit chain, no matter how flawed Boston Market was. That decline is a study in everything that can damage a restaurant chain.
Let’s look at those issues now.
Overexpansion and overestimation
Let’s start with the first and arguably biggest problem right off the bat. Boston Market was founded in a suburb of, you guessed it, Boston in the 1980s.
It exploded in the 1990s as the brand’s executives bet that consumers would replace their home-cooked meals with rotisserie chicken meals with cornbread and homestyle sides they bought from Boston Market.
They would replace their home-cooked meals with prepared rotisserie chicken. They just wouldn’t get it from Boston Market. The company took out a lot of debt, but its stores couldn’t make money, leading to its 1998 bankruptcy filing.
Grocery stores
As we said, consumers did replace their evening meals with rotisserie chickens. They just bought them from the grocery store, took them home and had them that way. They didn’t make a special trip to Boston Market.
As it turns out, grocery stores were far more adept at the whole meal replacement game than was Boston Market. The ready availability of cheap rotisserie chickens from grocers, plus their own prepared-food game that helped with the sides, made it tough for a brand like Boston Market.
Can’t be a home meal replacement brand if people are replacing their home meals with meals they get when buying food for their home. I think that makes sense.
The real estate play
Boston Market ended up in bankruptcy in 1998. It was bought out of bankruptcy by none other than McDonald’s, which had plans for the chain.
Those plans did not involve actually running the restaurant chain, not initially. McDonald’s viewed it as a real estate play, because Boston Market had one thing in abundance, and that was real estate.
McDonald’s took 30% of the locations that it wanted and operated it over the years before finally unloading the brand to Sun Capital in 2007.
Zombie problems
There were a couple of glorious years in the mid-2010s in which Boston Market stopped declining and actually added locations.
But for the most part, Boston Market was largely a zombie chain in the years under Sun. It didn’t grow and usually ended up closing more restaurants than it opened every year. In 2019 the company closed a number of locations as part of an out-of-court restructuring.
All of which is to say that the chain was a struggling brand in decline when the pandemic hit.
Major economic challenges
It’s worth remembering that this century has included the dot-com collapse and Sept. 11, the Great Recession and then the pandemic. None of these periods did the chain any favors.
Serious economic problems often reveal problems so much as they cause them, because the weakest chains often struggle the most during these periods. Boston Market closed well over 100 stores from 2008 through 2010.
It closed fewer stores during the pandemic. But that was also when the company was sold at a low price to a former Pizza Hut franchisee named Jay Pandya.
The death spiral
As we’ve reported, under Pandya Boston Market didn’t pay bills, including rent, taxes and many other vendors. That included US Foods, which ultimately stopped providing the company with food.
Landlords and others shut down locations. The chain had nearly 300 locations entering the pandemic. And 342 at the end of 2020. It closed 55 locations in 2022 and nearly 200 in 2023. The rest have gradually shut down since and the brand is now down to just a few.
But with so many issues facing the brand, in some respects it’s a surprise it lasted this long.