As chain's fortunes fluctuate, Roy Rogers founder looks ahead
By DANA HEDGPETH, Washington Post
Web-posted: 8:27 a.m. June 1, 2000
They've been nicknamed the lone cowboys.
Pete Plamondon Sr. and his two sons, Pete Jr. and Jim, recently opened their 15th Roy Rogers restaurant in Frederick, Md., years after most of their fellow Roy Rogers owners have ridden into the sunset.
The chain that was started nearly 30 years ago under the direction of Plamondon Sr., then an executive at Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott International Inc., has dwindled from 600 restaurants to barely 100, from Connecticut to West Virginia. The Plamondons are one of the chain's largest remaining franchisees. They've stuck with the brand, named for the movie star of the 1950s, even as it was bought out by Hardee's and later McDonald's, deals that left many of the chain's restaurants closed or under different flags.
The new restaurant is the first the Plamondons have built since 1993 and one of the few new Roy Rogers restaurants anywhere in years. And, eventually, the family wants to keep growing back where it all began, the Washington area.
"They stuck with it," said Teresa Cifone, a franchise business consultant for the Roy Rogers chain. "They're die-hard Roy Rogers guys. They've got a great product, great food and a very big commitment."
The privately owned and run family business operates its 15 restaurants in Frederick, Hagerstown, and Cumberland, Md.; and Leesburg, Va.; each has sales of more than $1 million a year. The Plamondons also own two Marriott hotels in Frederick.
Plamondon Sr. helped develop the idea for the restaurant as part of his job at Marriott, where he was in charge of restaurant divisions for 16 years. When a friend of Marriott chief executive J.W. "Bill" Marriott suggested getting the cowboy movie star to put his name on the restaurant, Plamondon Sr. went to work opening the first one in northern Virginia in 1968.
When he first launched the brand, he did no marketing study to see how it would catch on. "The branding caught on because of the cowboy himself," Plamondon said. Today, he jokes, his sons spend considerable time and effort getting focus groups to analyze what customers want out of their restaurants.
The menu then was designed to be simple and good. Plamondon Sr., 69, said Bill Marriott created the recipe for fried chicken at the test kitchen in Marriott's headquarters. "We had the holy trio," Plamondon Sr. said. That's roast beef, fried chicken and the popular Double Bar R Burger -- a hamburger topped with ham. "We had to be a cut above," he said. "Everybody can build a building, but not everybody understands the product."
When Hardee's Food Systems Inc. bought the chain from the Marriotts in 1990, it tried to change some of the restaurants to Hardee's. "We started changing over the restaurants and putting up Hardee's flags and people started saying they wanted their Roy Rogers back," said Sharon Hamilton, a spokeswoman at Hardee's headquarters in Rocky Mount, N.C. Some franchisees said sales were cut in half as the restaurants changed brands. "We just had to convert them back," Hamilton said.
Three years ago, Hardee's sold 180 company-owned restaurants in the core Washington-Baltimore region to McDonald's, which has since been converting or closing many of the restaurants. Now there are only 42 Roy Rogers restaurants in Maryland and 11 in Virginia, but none in Washington D.C., according to a list from Hardee's, which retained the brand and continues to franchise it.
Plamondons remained steadfast to the Roy Rogers brand, although they said they were offered other flags, including Burger King. As the housing boom hit Frederick County, making it one of the fastest-growing areas in the region, the Plamondons continued to open restaurants. "Frederick's a very powerful market," said Plamondon Sr. With little corporate control, the Plamondons are essentially franchisees with no franchiser, they said.
That means the Plamondons don't have to pony up huge advertising budgets like those of their competitor McDonald's. Fliers announcing the new restaurant's opening are given out at the nearby strip mall and as inserts in the local newspaper. A cousin in Pennsylvania does most of their marketing.
Like most in the service industry in this strong economy, the Plamondons said the biggest challenge has been getting workers to fill the shifts. Jim Plamondon offered employees at his other restaurants and hotels $100 for referring full-time associates. To cut costs, Plamondon Jr. got some of the staff from the hotels he oversees to help with last-minute cleanup of the new restaurant before its opening.
That's in sharp contrast to the heady days of the 1970s when the chain was expanding nationwide.
"I remember driving my dad and the Mr. Roy Rogers around to one of our grand openings in our family's station wagon," said Jim Plamondon. "People know Roy Rogers. They love him. He was a legend."
Over the years, franchisees said they've had to remind customers they are still around. Jim Plamondon laments that changes in ownership have "eroded the value of the brand."
John Hamburger, a Minnesota restaurant consultant, said it's rare to see a franchisee stay with one brand even as it changes ownership. "The fact that the (Plamondons) stuck with Roys is probably a very good move because it has a real, loyal following," he said. "People were used to Roys and they stuck with going to them."
Take Sammie Young, 72.
For more than a decade, he took his grandson and his wife religiously once a week to a Roy Rogers in Silver Spring, Md., at University Boulevard near their house, but when it went out of business, he rarely went to any other restaurant in the chain. When driving back from visiting relatives, he saw one of Plamondon's restaurants off Route 15 north and stopped.
"I told my wife, 'My God, there's a Roy Rogers,' " Young said. "We so rarely see them anymore. We stop at one wherever we can. It's an institution."