by Josh Ozersky
Harland Sanders, still just a mortal man, had no power beyond his immediate surroundings. But what if he could be in more places than one? The fact that Sanders Court had been marooned on a local road was its death knell, but the Colonel had already been thinking of bigger things, ways to be bigger than just the guy with the best motel in southern Kentucky, for several years. The key was franchising. Franchising would allow Harland Sanders to be everywhere at once; to share his success with others, in the true Rotarian way; to be more places and to make more money than he ever had before.
The idea of franchising was an old one even in the mid-1950s. Essentially, it was an arrangement by which small businesses could build off of bigger, more successful ones. A small, independent business (say, a hamburger restaurant or car lot) paid to be part of a larger system with its own respected brand, like McDonald’s or Ford. In return, the franchisees got a ready-to-sell product and various kinds of infrastructure support, such as special equipment, national advertising, and even a ready-to-go operations system like the legendary McDonald’s operations “bible.” The franchise was and is much more than just a business arrangement, though. It is America in microcosm, a federation of small, independent owners all in league with each other and with a central, defining institution. It’s a profound invention, the very heart of the American Dream. At least in the early stages, it takes very little to purchase a franchise; frequently good character and a decent credit rating are all that is required to participate in a business far larger, more complex, and more rewarding than any citizen could plausibly expect to create on his or her own.
Kentucky Fried Chicken operates on essentially the same principle as all modern franchising relationships. An investor applies to the parent corporation, Kentucky Fried Chicken, for the right to own and operate a business site with that name. The franchise fee isn’t usually that high; it was $20,000 in the 1960s and stayed in the $20,000–$30,000 range throughout the 1980s. The real hurdle isn’t the franchise fee or the 9 percent commission on profits; that’s money the franchisees never see and helps pay for national advertising, new product development, and other investments that company officials hope will be good for business. There are the costs of actually building the restaurant, which can range from $1 million to $2 million. But assuming that a potential franchisee has good credit, that kind of money can be borrowed from the bank. The one big block that today keeps many small-business owners from joining the Great Kentucky Soviet is the requirement that the applicant show a net worth of $1 million and at least $360,000 in liquid assets. Only millionaires need apply! Additionally, the current corporate owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a spin-off from PepsiCo called Yum! Brands, also insists that the franchisee take on the corporation’s other properties, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and commit to opening multiple stores over a period of three to five years.
The difference between the average Kentucky Fried Chicken owner in the 1960s and one in our own time is, then, the very difference between Colonel Sanders and the senior management team at PepsiCo and Yum! Brands. What made all the fast-food businesses grow so fast was the accessibility to the mainstream it gave them. A restaurant might offer a good hamburger or great fried chicken thanks to the specially seasoned flour a flamboyant character called Colonel Sanders sold; through the mighty power of franchising, thousands could all not just sell special fried chicken but actually be a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, exactly like all the others. The excellence of one not only guaranteed the excellence of the others and the concomitant success; it actually improved them. By aligning with something larger than themselves, the restaurants were better than any single one could ever be: more reliable, less prone to failure, labor crises, and so on.
Consider the note of triumphalism that comes from the first of all the great American fast-food chains, White Castle. “When you sit in a White Castle,” a 1932 brochure told potential operators,
remember that you are one of several thousands; you are sitting on the same kind of stool; you are being served on the same kind of counter; the coffee you drink is made in accordance with a certain formula; the hamburger you eat is prepared in exactly the same way over a gas flame of the same intensity; the cups you drink from are identical with thousands of cups that thousands of other people are using at the same moment; the same standard of cleanliness protects your food. . . . Even the men who serve you are guided by standards of precision which have been thought out from beginning to end.3
Of course, that kind of power, the result of thousands of identical businesses all drawing on the energy and dedication of small entrepreneurs, was not yet available to the Colonel. It was not even something he would have imagined. But the root of it was an arrangement, in the starkest and most intimate terms, between Colonel Sanders and a far-flung network of diners, roadhouses, and greasy spoons. It was as simple as this: they could serve a dish called Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken in exchange for a nickel for each chicken they sold, and they had to buy the equipment and special recipe (a pressure cooker and the seasoned flour) from Colonel Sanders himself. It was strictly a handshake deal, and the honor system was good enough for the Colonel. As for how they cooked “his” chicken and whether it might be up to his standards, that was a matter to be left to the Fates. He had neither the means nor, to be frank, the motivation to do so. He had his hands full making sure the flour was seasoned right with what would soon be known as his “eleven secret herbs and spices,” and Claudia had enough help filling the bags up and mailing them out. It was up to the franchisees to make the chicken well. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t sell, and the Colonel would be left to live on his Social Security check.
The franchisees are the real heroes of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The story of Kentucky Fried Chicken starts with one man and continues with a series of impersonal corporate overlords. But its primary life force consists neither in buckets of fried chicken nor in the image of its iconic founder; it has grown and prospered and expanded, even in the shadow of the Great Wall of China, because of the franchisees who together forge into the future, bound by one business and by the endless, dispiriting struggle to run it well. There were no trips to Russia or Rose Bowl Parade rides for the franchisees; all they could hope for was to make a living. By working together as a great fried-chicken collective under the Colonel’s banner, they were able to make a good income and put their kids through college. Harland Sanders was their Lenin, and the empire he built outlived communism, the Automat, and the betting odds. But first, he needed to truly re-create himself as the Colonel.
The physical part was easy enough, but what about the actual title? The twenty-first-century title has essentially no meaning to its public; as with General Tso or Sergeant Pepper, the rank is a vague honorific carried by a semifictional figure. Earlier in the chain’s history, of course, it meant something; it was meant to broadcast to diners in faraway lands that this was a product of the Old South. The Kentucky colonelcy established in 1813, though predating even the cotton kingdom and its feudal plantation system, was dear to the hearts of post-Reconstruction boomers. It spoke to the magnolia-scented mythos of the Old South, the “lost cause,” and its aristocratic gallantries. The position was always an honorary one that carried with it neither rank nor responsibility; the military music of its name was merely a theatrical effect, like epaulets or the ceremonial swords carried by Asian diplomats. Even by the trifling standards of such titles, the commission was easy to get, a political trifle given out by the governor with no restrictions whatsoever. According to the order’s mission statement,
The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels does not appoint or commission Kentucky Colonels. That can only be done by the sitting Governor of the Commonwealth. Only the Governor knows the reason for bestowing the honor of a Colonel’s Commission on any particular individual.
This is an ideal qualification for a political honor—almost platonic. There are some hard and fast requirements, however:
To obtain a Kentucky Colo
nel Commission, an applicant must be recommended by an individual who holds a Colonel Commission. The applicant must also be 18 years old. Further information can be obtained by contacting the Governor’s Office in Frankfort. The address is Attention: Lora Quire, Room 8, Governor’s Office, State Capital, Frankfort, KY 40601.
The colonelcy was indubitably a stroke of marketing genius—a guaranteed lock on the mythos of the Deep South and a whiff of magnolia for those faraway territories where Kentucky Fried Chicken had no natural constituency. The vaguely martial honor seems so antique and theatrical that it borders on the exotic; to somebody who never heard of a Kentucky Colonel, it’s as gratifying and mysterious as the grandiose sobriquets created for themselves by African dictators.
The early 1950s were good years for Sanders. He had found at last the outlet for the larger-than-life persona that his personality seemed to demand and which had served fruitlessly in his various forays as businessman and booster. His new colonelcy served him well when things were going well; it certainly made him more memorable. But he still looked the same, albeit with a beard. When the bad news about the new highway came down from Lexington in 1955, he found himself with little else but his title, some affected facial hair, and a really great recipe for fried chicken. He was now sixty-five years old, broke, and with nothing to show for nearly twenty years of effort. The only mercy extended him was that he and Josephine had divorced in 1947, and he had married Claudia Ledington, a waitress at the cafe, in 1949. The two were inseparable. Claudia’s steadfast loyalty was to be a great comfort to him at this dark hour. She was willing to do anything the Colonel asked—she managed to overcome her deeply ingrained shyness and reserve so she could walk around in antebellum dress in the last years of Sanders Cafe. She took his storms and rages in stride and as much as anyone helped make his business success a reality. He never needed her more than at that moment when all seemed lost. “The Colonel might say he didn’t know what to do, but we who knew and understood him knew that it wouldn’t be long before he would know exactly what to do,” she later said. And so he did. “Claudia,” he told his wife, “now that I have nothing pushing me I am going to put my efforts on my fried chicken. . . . I am going to improve it and introduce it to the public in other restaurants. In other words, I am going to franchise it.”4
And now at sixty-five the Colonel was set to begin the most arduous job of his life and the one that would cement his fame. He wasn’t looking for his first franchisee; three years earlier, a restaurant owner in Salt Lake City named Leon “Pete” Harman had put the Colonel’s chicken on the menu, and a smattering of other places had accepted his nickel-a-chicken handshake offer. But that was when he was dealing from a position of strength. He had been a respected restaurateur, the keeper of a southern kitchen that had received national praise. He made a plenty of money and didn’t really need those franchise fees. Now he did. It was a consummate act of salesmanship and self-promotion: he presented himself as a man with a product so famous and valuable that it alone could change the fortunes of failing restaurants. What’s more, he projected all the warmth and friendship that would turn a potential franchiser into a member of his chicken “family”—even inviting each one, then and for many years after, to stay at his home and enjoy a breakfast cooked by the Colonel himself. This was an important bit of business—they might well have seen him as a needy, possibly even pathetic figure, an old drummer still on the road when he should be enjoying the fruits of his life’s work.
The Colonel wasn’t selling “fast food” then or afterward. His chicken, even in the pressure cooker, took a long time to make, and today the time cycle still hasn’t shortened that much. The small restaurants to which he was able to sell his chicken were themselves homey affairs of the very kind that fast-food restaurants of the 1960s and ’70s constantly referenced. The idea of a dedicated chicken restaurant was something that never occurred to him.
The physical demands of being on the road would have been wearisome even to a younger man. The Colonel and Claudia loaded up the car with bags of seasoned flour, the pressure cooker (more on this later), and some paper goods with the Colonel’s likeness and the words “Kentucky Fried Chicken” printed on them. Then he hit the road, driving all day in Indiana and Illinois, looking for prospects. On some nights he slept in the backseat of his Cadillac in his white suit, shaving and combing his hair in the morning in a service station—no doubt inferior in every way to the one he had owned and run for twenty years in Corbin. He was an old man whose body had seen a lot of hard labor, and he had arthritis. He popped aspirins throughout the day. Frequently, he was dismissed or derided by people he visited. Kentucky Fried Chicken was built on the efforts of one old man tirelessly driving around to back-road diners nearly as decrepit as himself.
Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, remembers meeting the Colonel during this era:
I had never seen a black suit like that in my life. [The Colonel’s “white suit” period started later.] The coat had long tails and fit him perfectly. His graying goatee was perfectly trimmed and he carried a gold-tipped cane. Colonel Sanders was one of a kind . . . he introduced himself and asked if I knew him. I pretended I didn’t even though I knew all about him. We sat down over a cup of coffee, and he talked to me like an old friend. I’ve never met a better salesman. When he left, I had a sense this man was going to change my life. . . . Maybe this Colonel in a white Cadillac had something.
After all, Thomas reasoned, “food is a personal thing, and it’s tied closely to family life. People want to know the values of the person who is ladling out the goods. Harland Sanders stood for values that people understood and liked.”5 Many years later Thomas would take a page out of the Colonel’s book and become the living personification of Wendy’s—albeit without any of his mentor’s flamboyance.
The Colonel well knew how to leverage his persona, taking great pains to emphasize his down-home origins and playing up his country lingo, dropping extra “dad gumbits” and “Don’t ya sees?” in his conversations. It wasn’t a sham; the Colonel’s backcountry bona fides were unimpeachable. Still, there was a level of artifice. When he dictated business letters or talked business, there was nothing folksy about him. But in the mid-1950s, one of his favorite promotional tacks was to find a local radio or TV station and present himself as a guest on a talk show, bringing chicken with him and sometimes handing out drumsticks to the audience.
When a restaurant did adopt Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Colonel would make a public appearance, sometimes even bringing along Claudia in a full-dress antebellum ensemble and introducing her as “the Colonel’s lady.” On these memorable occasions, he would cook the chicken himself in the back. “Then,” he would remember later, “when I got a supply of orders ahead, I’d go out and do what I called a ‘a little coloneling.’ I’d take off my apron, dust the flour off my pants, put on my vest, long-tailed coat, and gold watch chain, and go out into the dining room and talk to the guests.”6
Neither the long-tailed coat nor the gold watch made it to the final uniform; the Colonel sometimes donned a black suit, as Kentucky colonels are wont to do, until he figured out that a white one was more immediately identifiable. It was television producers who told him how the white suit made him stand out, giving him a visual signature—an endowment that can hardly be overstated in the fast-food business, where image is everything.
Perhaps this is overstating matters. Image isn’t everything. The most Herculean marketing efforts will be in vain if the product is inedible, the stores dirty, or the service insolent. But the enormous pressure of low costs and high volume tends to flatten out food quality in the quick-service restaurant business, or QSR, as it is known in the trade. And given that the market is continually saturated, all that separates one chain from another is its brand, which is to say its iconography.
That said, it would have been much easier for the Colonel if, like his handlers later in life, all he had to worry about was the use and misuse of his image. The p
roblem was that especially in the early going, Sanders was concerned with matters beyond just marketing and public relations. As he saw it, the essence of his business, the thing that would make him rich again and so redeem his life, was the singular quality of his chicken. He had, he believed, found a way to re-create the tenderness and delicacy of traditional southern pan-fried chicken with something close to the ease and speed of open deep-frying. And this technology was the means by which he finally, after a lifetime of effort, found a product worthy of his salesmanship. The Colonel’s image was all-important, and the innovations made by Pete Harman, his first and greatest franchisee, were of enormous importance to Kentucky Fried Chicken. But at the heart of it was the chicken itself, and what made the chicken great was the innovation of using a pressure cooker to make it. It’s much less glamorous than any secret mixture of herbs and spices but far more important.
