It Turns Out Carl's Jr. Started Out As A Hot Dog Cart
If you're into fast food at all, chances you've heard of Carl's Jr. Or maybe you know it as Hardee's. Thanks to a unique arrangement with their parent company, CKE Restaurants, Carl's Jr. and Hardee's are essentially the same restaurant, with one operating in the western half of America while the other operates in the eastern half. They may have begun as separate chains, but now, they're basically exactly the same place, just with different branding depending on which bank of the Mississippi you're currently standing on. And speaking of how they began, Carl's Jr. got off to a more unusual start than most fast-food places — it started as a hot dog cart.
While McDonald's started as a BBQ restaurant and Chick-fil-A was a burger place, at least those were restaurants. But in the case of Carl's Jr., the origins of a major brand were one guy selling hot dogs on wheels. Things really can change over time.
The Carl's Jr. founder took out a loan against his car to get started
When he purchased his first hot dog stand in Los Angeles in 1941, Carl Karcher was a bread truck driver with no experience in direct food service. (This is more common than you might think; college-age brothers Dan and Frank Carney started Pizza Hut in 1958 despite barely even knowing what pizza was (and certainly having no idea how to make it), and James Disbrow started Buffalo Wild Wings despite his previous job experience being in figure skating.)
But Karcher's restaurant has perhaps the wackiest origin story. He and his wife, Margaret, took out a loan against their Plymouth, threw in a bit of their own money, and bought the stand for the sum of $326 (granted, that's several thousand dollars in today's money), initially selling hot dogs, tamales, chili dogs, and soda.
Their burgeoning empire took off surprisingly quickly ; it turned out the people of southern California had an appetite for what they were serving. In short order, the Karchers had three more hot dog stands, and in 1945, they opened their first full service restaurant, Carl's Drive-In BBQ, in nearby Anaheim. It wasn't until 1956 that the Karchers opened the first Carl's Jr. — so called because it was smaller than their main restaurants — and dove into the burger business. Things grew from there, and the company had 100 locations by 1975.
Other major restaurant brands come from places you might not expect
To be fair, there are other chain restaurants that sprang from surprising beginnings. The Cheesecake Factory, for instance, started with a couple operating a literal factory that made cheesecakes and sold them to restaurants, until their son decided to cut out the middle man and open a restaurant for themselves.
TGI Friday's was, improbably, America's first true singles bar, with the founder trying to meet women as much as his patrons were. KFC was started when "Colonel" Harlan Sanders started selling chicken out of the gas station he was managing in the 1930s.
It just goes to show that no matter where a food brand begins, they can always end up somewhere you might not expect. If not for one guy and his hot dog stand during World War II, we would never have been introduced to the Thickburger.