Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

  It was a key moment for the franchisees, since the franchisee contract that had been in place since 1976 was overdue for renewal and PepsiCo was dilatory about renewing it. The contract was one of the strongest in the fast-food business, not because Heublein, who granted it, was especially forward-thinking or had any special concern for the actual restaurant operators, but simply because, as a body, the franchisees had been endowed from the earliest days of the company with collective powers that couldn’t easily be trampled. The Colonel had seen to that when he sold to Brown and Massey, who, to give them credit, remained eager to work with their operational partners.8 The franchisees paid a royalty to the company, contributed to national advertising campaigns, and were guaranteed that no one could open another store within a mile and a half. Most importantly, it was part of the agreement that any franchisee’s contract, if the restaurant was up to operating standards, would automatically renew for ten more years when the original twenty-year run was up. This last provision, though it had no impact on the running of the business, was an essential safeguard against the tyranny of any future corporate parent. Had the contract been an open negotiation, any franchisee could not have failed to come under the thumb of his or her vast and impersonal overlords, who might have designs on the store themselves. This eventuality was soon poised to pass, and it showed great foresight on the part of the contract’s framers to plan against it.

  PepsiCo, it was thought, wanted to operate all the stores itself; it wasn’t a federation of small-business owners but a transnational conglomerate, and it hadn’t paid $840 million so that it would have to negotiate every move with a bunch of chicken cooks. Cranor presented the franchisees with their new contract, which simply eliminated all of their protections. There would be no renewal rights, no mileage minimums between stores, a ten-year extension so gutted as to be utterly impotent, and, for good measure, a higher franchisee fee. John Cranor III walked into the meeting and, for all intents and purposes, told Darlene Pfeiffer that this was the new contract and that she and the rest of the franchisees would take it and like it.9

  The franchisees thought otherwise. Unlike the Colonel, who had been bought out early and could only bang his cane in frustration, they were still invested in the business. In any real sense, they were the business. They gathered in Louisville to consider their options. It was obvious that they had only one: one franchisee after another pledged unconquerable resolve, and together they agreed to sue.

  Standing up to PepsiCo was no easy thing. It cost money—a thousand dollars per store, and not once, but many times. Moreover, the eleven plaintiffs in the suit, including Pete Harman himself, now sixty-six years old, were declared “franchisees not in good standing” by the company and were forbidden to open new stores or buy existing ones. Eventually the ban was extended systemwide, and for seven years the system simply stopped growing. The franchisees continued to fight, however, lining up behind Harman. If the first, biggest, and most powerful franchisee could take the gaff, so could they. His 250 stores were the royalty of the chain, the best run and most profitable in the system, and his moral authority was spotless as well. The lawsuit dragged on. Kentucky Fried Chicken stopped growing as a business. There was now open warfare between its corporate owners and the people who actually ran it. These were dark times, and in the public sphere that was controlled by PepsiCo, the once-proud brand, absent its real-world founder, was to be abased and degraded by its new owners to a distressing degree.

  The next six years were some of the worst in KFC history. With business growth stymied at home, PepsiCo turned its eyes eastward, where it would, as its executives imagined, have a free hand in developing new businesses. There, it was thought, the corporation would not need to limit growth to freestanding restaurants; it could do delivery, kiosks in airports and supermarkets, trailers, and other unexplored avenues. By 1991, pretax profits from overseas for the time exceeded those the company made at home. It made sense, therefore, to pour more money into overseas operations, and to this day those markets remain KFC’s profit center.

  A more sinister development, from the franchisees’ point of view, was PepsiCo’s ongoing, insatiable desire to gobble up franchises—more than six hundred over the next three years above the significant number of stores it already owned. It wouldn’t have taken much for the franchisees to sell out to PepsiCo; they might have made a nice payday, especially the smaller ones who faced an uncertain future at best—and at worst a seemingly endless war with a parent corporation that could easily afford to wait them out for decades to come.

  Behind the scenes, however, PepsiCo was growing impatient with the situation. It was clear within the company that the troubles with KFC’s franchisees, which was echoed in Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, the other fast-food chains PepsiCo bought and alienated with its high-handed ways, were making the division more trouble than it was worth. It meant to spin off the business and approved a plan to create Tricon Global Restaurants in August 1997.

  Anyone, whether inside the company or out, under the impression that a change of ownership would result in a new and more respectful use of the Colonel’s image was soon disabused of the notion. Despite now being a more or less independent company for the first time in almost thirty years, the same inexorable, corrupting influences that had led to wallpaper-paste gravy and wars against franchisees were about to be exerted directly against the Colonel’s image in what remains the nadir of KFC’s relationship with the name and likeness of Harland Sanders.

  Someone at Tricon, noting that young people were not as eager to eat KFC chicken as often as they might be, decided that the Colonel needed to be “hip.” It might have been a response to faltering market share and the general sense—inevitable, perhaps, but also shortsighted—that the brand needed to become “younger” in order to persist into the sunny future that Tricon projected for itself. For whatever reasons, that fall Colonel Sanders was turned into a cartoon character for TV commercials, and the degradation of the Colonel’s image was complete.

  In 1999 the company hired long-standing advertising agency Young and Rubicam to create a cartoon version of the Colonel. Though wearing Harland Sanders’ white suit and black glasses, the figure looked nothing whatsoever like the Colonel, nor did it sound like him: actor Randy Quaid was brought in to voice the character, giving him a southern accent utterly different from the rural border-state accent the Colonel actually had and that was well remembered by adults who had seen his commercials. (David Kamp, a food historian, said he would always remember Sanders’ boast about how the chicken got an “egg warsh” before frying.)

  The cartoon Colonel was a frisky figure who danced, skipped, sang, bopped his cane against things for emphasis, spun around with vaudevillian abandon, and generally behaved like a buffoon. The legendary low point of the campaign featured him showing off his hip-hop cred by dancing the Cabbage Patch, an already dated end-zone dance, and yelling “Go Colonel! Go Colonel!” But, in fact, the depravity of the campaign extended in many directions at once. There was the sheer hucksterism of it. “These days everyone’s trying to get Nintendo’s Pokemon,” he tells us in a pitch shoehorned into a popcorn-chicken commercial, itself an awful novelty product the Colonel would have loathed. “So catch a Pokemon beanbag for only $4.99. Ah’m starting my own collection!” There was also a transparent attempt to court urban blacks, having the Colonel say, “The Colonel, he da man!” and dunking a basketball.

  On one level the campaign could be defended as part of a nearly universal practice among American retail brands, which are under constant pressure to keep pace with changing culture. Despite the absence of nearly any hard evidence to the contrary, it is taken as an article of faith that a brand needs to seem young and with-it to “stay novel,” lest it sacrifice its “viability” or “relevance.” Although some of the nation’s most successful brands, like Wonder Bread or Mr. Clean, suffer not a whit from having hardly changed seems to have no larger lesson. (Youthful hipness, the most ephemeral of all social
qualities, is uniquely ill suited to committee-designed simulation.) If a fast-food chain was going to resist the temptation to remake itself to teen tastes, it should have been KFC. Like a dowager in low-rise jeans, it couldn’t help but look ridiculous with its invention of a dancing, hip-hop-flavored cartoon Colonel; but then, it just couldn’t help itself. This was, after all, part of the American Dream too: a fluid flow of constant reinvention that, in taking its pursuers far from their roots, sometimes made them over one time too many.

  The chain was, it turned out, one of the most insecure of fast-food entities, as had been shown by an equally frantic decision in 1991 to actually change the name of the company from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. One of the biggest brands in the world experienced what can only be called an identity crisis and literally attempted to erase its name. The earlier act of self-negation was bad enough; it wasn’t uncommon for people to refer to Kentucky Fried Chicken as KFC anyway, much as McDonald’s is sometimes semi-affectionately called “Mickey D’s.” A more serious violation came in the form of the chain’s ongoing attempts throughout the ’90s and even the aughts to dissociate it entirely from the core product, fried chicken. This pained the Colonel’s daughter Margaret keenly. When David Novak took charge in 1992, she made a point of saying, “Father would have liked him. He came right out and talked about how proud he was and how proud we should all be of our Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe. He didn’t try to hide it by saying KFC like the rest of those PepsiCo people.”10 Even today, after KFC has emerged from its fugue state and again embraced both its name and its founder, there are still hundreds of KFC Express outlets in grim food malls around the country where one can’t buy fried chicken but only strips, sandwiches, and other simulacra.

  While the campaign got some short-term results in overall quarterly profits, the damage to the brand’s prestige, already battered by decades of neglect and mismanagement, was unmistakable. A survey by USA Today found that only 15 percent of those polled liked the new dancing Colonel.11 Other critics used the campaign as a way to bash KFC. Mark Schone, on NPR’s This American Life, began by mocking the campaign (“The erstwhile southern gentleman twirls his cane like Huggy Bear and pimp-limps to the greasy beat of old-school southern funk”) and then used that as a way to revile the Colonel himself, calling him “a redneck” with “the last lingering stink of the Old South” on him who needed redeeming by “growing up to be a black man.”12 Many franchisees were taken aback, despite the sales boost, and the Colonel’s contemporaries were predictably appalled. “I was personally off ended at that,” John Y. Brown said. “I didn’t think it was right.”13 KFC was flailing wildly around in search of relevance, which of course had the exact opposite effect, and soon (though not soon enough) saw the folly of its way.

  In a way, the cartoon Colonel misadventure spoke to the essential problem that Kentucky Fried Chicken had always faced and would continue to face. The Colonel’s image has certain abstract qualities, such as the grandfatherly wisdom it projected to a billion Chinese consumers or the down-home southern image that was its original purpose. But beyond these eminently helpful qualities was the generally unwelcome fact that Colonel Sanders was a real person—altogether too real for KFC management during his lifetime and even by 1993, more than ten years in the grave, an uneasy fit for the new image that KFC wanted to have. It wasn’t just a question of the Colonel being dead; Wendy’s revived Dave Thomas a few years after his passing but in a tasteful way, paying tribute to his legacy and promising to continue doing things “Dave’s way.” The difference was that the Colonel had stood for a particular product cooked a particular way, and that product was (it was thought) no longer as appealing to the public. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it had been of the utmost necessity that KFC sell popcorn chicken and Pokemon tie-ins. Throwing the Colonel’s official portrait onto these products wouldn’t help sell them; moreover, the incongruity of pairing an elderly, white-haired gentleman with a Japanese fantasy manga game might even have the undesirable effect of making KFC look ludicrous.

  Or, to be more charitable, let’s say that it was necessary to connect to with-it youths—certainly, this was a real enough issue for any number of its competitors, such as Church’s. The Colonel, in his planter’s suit, might not be an ideal symbol for such a market. There is simply nothing to be done about it. The Colonel is the Colonel. He alone differentiates KFC from its rivals, and only his transhuman authority keeps the business from becoming completely unmoored. Fast-food franchisees love to speak about tradition because tradition is what they most conspicuously lack; the buildings and menus and design motifs all change from year to year because they have to, lest they fall back into the pack and be lost in what business writer Robert Emerson has called “the endless shakeout” of emerging and expiring concepts. Words like “classic” and “old-fashioned” are fictions as invaluable to fast-food restaurants as testimonials in a Ponzi scheme.

  But at the same time, tradition can be crippling: the conventions of the past can deleteriously hold back the innovations of the future and the desperate need of a business to react to what’s happening in the market. Xerox is still reeling from its decision to part with what would become the Apple computer operating system because it couldn’t see how that would help sell copy machines. In this regard, KFC has been particularly vulnerable for three decades and counting. But there was always the real, live Colonel acting as a “badwill ambassador,” holding the owners back, criticizing them publicly and denigrating their efforts to fend off such real or imagined rivals as Church’s or Boston Market. In the ’70s he felt, and not without some justice, that as the founder and living personification of Kentucky Fried Chicken he should be able to speak freely about its flaws, presumably in the hope of redeeming them. Heublein executives felt that his job should be to look like the guy on the bucket, wave benignly from cars in parades, and generally not cause trouble. But, as noted, that’s not who Colonel Sanders was; if it had been, he would have stayed with the Columbusville Chamber of Commerce or Michelin or his gas station in Corbin or the Sanders Cafe; the man Heublein wanted was a man who would take his check every month as Sanders might have been expected to take his Social Security check when he was sixty-five rather than going around in a car promoting a product that didn’t exist and using the image of a man who wasn’t famous.

  It was akin to the difference between fried chicken and popcorn chicken. Popcorn chicken is created from the void, having no bones or skin or fat; it is malleable muscle tissue, a blank canvas on which to paint crunchiness and salt. Chicken on the bone is infinitely more problematic and complicated. The dark meat doesn’t cook at the same rate as the white meat, which takes a long time to cook; the parts are all different sizes; it doesn’t conveniently disappear once consumed; it certainly can’t be easily eaten while driving or for that matter anywhere there’s not a huge pile of napkins and a sink nearby for washing hands. Nobody in their right mind, sitting down to create a multinational QSR franchise, would choose chicken. It’s inappropriate in every way for a fast-food concept. But nobody sat down to create KFC as we know it today—the red-and-white leviathan that dominates China and whose stock is traded on Wall Street alongside Exxon and General Motors. It started out as a dining room in a gas station in Kentucky. The desire to distance itself from those quaint but constricting roots had been at the heart of PepsiCo’s sometimes licentious use of the Colonel’s image. And soon the Colonel’s creation, the chain’s primary product, would be under attack as well.

  Because, let’s face it. A transnational fast-food empire wouldn’t be founded on fried chicken at all. It would likely be some kind of product that Americans could pretend was good for them, like Subway sandwiches. Despite the universal appeal of fried food in general and fried chicken in particular (to say nothing of pressure-fried chicken), fried food by the 1980s was beginning to enter an irreversible decline in prestige. This was a problem, since the business was founded and had pitched itself as the ideal meal
for overworked mothers to feed their families. A typical commercial from the early ’70s begins, “Every day, all over town, women have a question on their minds. ‘What should I serve my family tonight?’ And every day, all over town, Colonel Sanders and his boys are cooking up the answer!” Through years of KFC advertising, this is the theme of themes: pick up a bucket and feed your family. “Kentucky Fried Chicken, it’s finger-lickin’ good, a treat every family enjoys”—so ran a seemingly ubiquitous jingle of 1971. An increasing concern with eating healthily was something KFC was able to shrug off in the 1970s; as the field became more crowded, though, and as Wendy’s and other chains began to offer salads and other, healthier fare, the burden of fried chicken became heavier to bear.

  As grotesque as the “dancing Colonel” campaign rolled out in 1999 was, it was not the furthest the company strayed from the Colonel’s vision, persona, or product. That seems hard to believe, and yet it is so. In 1991 Kentucky Fried Chicken, under discouraging market conditions and the somnolent and shortsighted leadership of R. J. Reynolds, decided not to be Kentucky Fried Chicken any more. Nothing could have been further from the spirit of the chain’s founder; and that is why I have saved it for last, to underscore the distance between the man, his image, and the business that controls the image. They are three very different things in constant tension.

  The reasons for so radical an act of self-erasure were, in retrospect, trivial. The business was making millions and was, by any standard, one of the most successful food-service businesses in the world—indeed, in the history of the world. But it wasn’t the prettiest girl at the party. The hot thing in chicken in the early ’90s was broiled breasts. Burger King’s BK Broiler was selling a million sandwiches a day. An upstart Latino chicken chain, El Pollo Loco, was tearing up the market, leading every rival in sales per store. A rush of unfried products was therefore fast-tracked through the system: skinless “light and crispy” chicken, a chicken-salad sandwich, a honey-barbecue chicken wing, a roasted chicken, and, of course, a BK Broiler knockoff. The chain threw everything at the development wall to see what would stick; nothing did. The products were tested in units here and there but never caught on.14 So, inevitably, someone like John Cranor III appeared out of the void, decreeing that Kentucky Fried Chicken thereafter be less associated with fried chicken and increasingly known just as KFC. Purely from a business point of view, this was a reckless and destructive act; it wasted at a stroke brand loyalties that had been built up for more than thirty years of sustained growth. But PepsiCo, KFC’s owner at the time, hadn’t been around for any of that, and PepsiCo could do what it wanted.