Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Colonel Sanders was born in the nineteenth century, in a place that might as well have been the eighteenth, lived deep into the twentieth century, and continues to be a larger-than-life presence in the twenty-first.

It’s worth emphasizing this - he was born in such a backwater place that it really might have well been the eighteenth century.

The phrase “American Dream” was coined specifically to describe a state of egalitarian opportunity, a novus orbis where a man might transcend his roots and create himself as he saw fit. The historian James Truslow Adams, who is given credit for coining the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America, defined it thus: The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement… It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. It was not, in other words, merely the chance to climb the social ladder; it was the chance to transcend who one was.

The best description of the American Dream I’ve ever read.

No one can fully appreciate the Colonel’s life and character without understanding both how desperate and how unexceptional was his mother’s situation. To be a relatively secure farmer in that time and place meant, at best, a level of desperation and privation that most Americans can barely imagine. The Panic of 1893, the worst depression the Unites States had yet faced, wrecked the nation’s economy, and farmers, arguably, took it hardest: they were subject to ruinous usury by banks, outright theft at the hands of real estate speculators and railroads, and little hope of getting either credit or hard currency. But the Sanderses weren’t even on that level; the family was struggling to survive on a basic subsistence level not far from life as it had been lived in frontier days—a period barely three generations removed. (Indiana was admitted as a state in 1816.)

This type of poverty, which is unimaginable to most Americans today, is why he was basically born in the eighteenth century.

[S]he put her oldest in charge of his younger brother and sister and hoped for the best. The Colonel, for his part, loved telling the story about the first time he took over the kitchen, baking a loaf of bread in a hot wood stove and proudly presenting it to his mother at the canning factory. The other women on the line all hugged and kissed the boy, a story he would retell decades later as an old man being showered with the country’s adoration.

Early validation and encouragement for cooking.

His mother sent him off to clear brush and scrubwood for a neighboring farmer—the kind of dull, relentless, lonely work that one tends to associate with chain gangs. He was ten.

Child labor was mandatory back then.

Nature is not long in punishing such indolence, and the lesson came quickly when the ten-year-old was fired and told by the neighbor, “You’re not worth a doggone, boy.” The shame of his failure he seems to have carried with him for the rest of his life. He dreaded having to go back to his mother and tell her that he had failed both her and his helpless little brother and sister. Nor was his dread misplaced: “It looks like you’ll never amount to anything,” the Colonel remembered her saying. “I’m afraid you’re just no good. Here I am, left alone with you three children to support”

For most of his life, he was a loser. He went from job to job, unable to really keep employmenet for very long. This is a classic sign that someone is meant to be an entrepreneur - they’re simply unemployable. He had basically started working at 10 years old and worked from dawn until sleep every single day. Life was brutal back then.

Even in his eighties, as one of the most famous people in America, he never seemed to question his upbringing or the injunctions received at his mother’s knee. He could, of course, never live up to them; though from his boyhood he had eschewed smoking, drinking, and gambling, he was afraid until the end of his days that his “cussing” would condemn him to eternal perdition.

As someone who has also never been able to quit his cursing habit, I’m right there with you Colonel.

That was his life on Monk’s farm the summer he was eleven: up before dawn, working until 10 p.m., getting his first calluses.

The concept of leisure is a very new one indeed.

Josephine bore three children but seems to have been little interested in lovemaking after that—an especially unfortunate circumstance given Sanders’ passionate and hot-blooded nature. He found his pleasures elsewhere, as his second wife’s nephew Don Ledington delicately but succinctly put it: “If [Josephine] wasn’t interested in that part of his life, obviously, he didn’t just forget about that part; he found what he needed to find in other places.”

To be fair to her, he was a truly terrible father and provider. But yeah, not a good marriage all around. Unsurprisingly, they end up divorcing.

He found a fireman job on the Norfolk and Western shoveling coal into the engine. It was a great job as far as Sanders was concerned, except that it kept him away from his children and his wife, who, for some reason, wasn’t answering his letters. Word got back that she had taken their babies and moved to her parents’ home in Jasper, Alabama.

Yeah Harlan, they don’t answer your letters because you’re a terrible father.

Sanders set upon a plan to kidnap the children and went so far as to clamber about in his in-laws’ bushes before he had a wise change of heart.

Definitely not a wise move.

[I]n the aftermath of a train wreck, he realized that the first lawyer on the scene would be able to sue for damages on behalf of his clients, but only if he could get to the injured parties before they signed their rights away to a railroad claims adjuster for one dollar or more, “depending on how much blood was on them,” as he would later remember. Sanders started working the dazed crowd with power-of-attorney forms using the hard-sell method that would later sway so many potential franchisees. Although the claims adjuster showed up soon afterward, Sanders was able to get enough clients to sign that he made $2,500 out of the accident—a small fortune for him and the first real money he ever made. This was the moment Sanders discovered his ability to shine under the spotlight, though this tendency had gone unnoticed during his days as a railroad.

So he gets into this trainwreck and decide, to heck with it, he can be just as good a lawyer as anyone. I suppose they really let anyone be a lawyer back in the day, as long as you could speak somewhat persuasively.

In 1915 in Arkansas, where he and his family were then living, pretty much anyone who “read the law” could represent a client in court—at least in the courts of justices of the peace where minor matters were settled—provided he could get a client.

Too funny. Like all his previous gigs, it doesn’t last too long, and soon he’s back on the railroad working for $1.65 an hour.

He wanted to be able to approach the higher strata of the society he lived in on equal terms. He understood that in the professional classes you weren’t just selling your labor; you were selling yourself. And he was a natural salesman. He wanted to wear a white shirt himself, a white collar.

So he switches to be a salesman. This is actually much closer to his character and nature.

It was explained to him that he would be given his commission only after he turned in his accounts; the accounts, to his mind, were his only means to get paid, and so he refused. He was fired. Even though he desperately wanted to be in the middle class, Sanders had no real idea of how the middle class actually operated.

Obviously, because he grew up in extreme poverty.

It should be said here, before going any further, that Harland Sanders seems to have been utterly without racial prejudice of any kind. No one who has spoken to me for this book nor any credible source in any of the primary or secondary literature about him has even hinted at bigotry or animosity on Sanders’ part. Like all southerners of his time, he said “Negro” until informed by some well-meaning person that the term had become offensive. (It did not become so until the mid-1960s; Martin Luther King used it in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.) In fact, the head of public relations for Kentucky Fried Chicken in the early 1970s was a black man named Ray Calander. Having spent a significant amount of time shuttling around with the Colonel during those years, Calander claims to be the one to have told him that he preferred to be called “black.” The Colonel replied, “Well, I wouldn’t call you nice folks black.”

This part I definitely believe. There is zero evidence to the rumor that he was part of the KKK or anything of the sort. I did search in Chat GPT and Google as well.

The young Sanders, eager to better himself in the world and an inveterate joiner, might have signed on for some short time. If so, he never spoke of it, and there is not the slightest hint of evidence for his having done so. It seems far more likely that as the nation’s most conspicuous elderly white southerner, Harland Sanders was a slate upon which dark suspicions could be written.

This seems far more likely. Racists / race-conscious people ascribe onto him supposed motives for which we have absolutely no evidence.

Like everything else in the Colonel’s life until Kentucky Fried Chicken came along, this career followed the usual trajectory: he quickly became the top tire salesman in Kentucky, but then in 1924, for reasons that remain murky, he either left the company or was fired and found himself back at square one.

Poor guy. I really cannot emphasize enough how big of a failure he was.

The drivers who came through frequently asked Sanders where they could get something to eat. There wasn’t much in the area. Now, Sanders fed his family in the station every day. Sometimes he even invited travelers to come in and join them. So it occurred to him: why not make a little something on the side?

The dawn of the road-side diners. Ride the trend of expanding highways and service those people.

They had food ready at 11 a.m., since easterners were used to eating at noon, and if none of them showed up, the family could eat the midday meal. If somebody did show up, the family would cook more later.

It almost starts out of convenience - well, we’re going to eat anyway, might as well have some guests.

Nothing represented the communal nature of rural poverty more than fried chicken. Not everybody has hogs and a smokehouse, and it goes without saying that the poorest Kentuckians were not the sort of people who had herds of cattle contentedly grazing on broad, green fields. No, the rural poor, in Kentucky and throughout the South and for that matter the world, were lucky to have a few yardbirds scratching around, eating bugs and dirt, and laying an occasional precious egg.

[sic]

Fried chicken, to the Colonel’s mind, was not really something that you ate in restaurants. It was a part of home life.

It’s important to remember this - fried chicken was a poor man’s food back in the day. The rich ate beef or pork! If you got the money together to go out to eat, why on earth would you eat chicken? So this was basically offering a comforting, home-cooked meal for folks.

[H]e understood that simply taking chicken parts, dredging them in flour, and dropping them into boiling oil alongside french fries and onion rings wasn’t really fried chicken. Fried chicken is very difficult to make well and impossible in a fry basket; nearly every traditional recipe, going back to the very first published cookbook in America, The Virginia House-Wife’s Cookbook (1824), calls for cooking it in a heavy pan. Heavy pans full of lard or oil are unwieldy and messy and difficult to handle. They also take a long time to cook food. Most of all, they require great skill on the part of the cook, which is one reason making great fried chicken was a special badge of honor among southern matriarchs, white and black. Without really knowing it, Sanders attempted to mass-produce this venerated dish, essentially the national food of the American South, for the first time.

Note that this was a technological innovation at its heart! For the first time, you could, without a rather heavy pan, consistently with quality cook chicken in a relatively quick way.

Anyone who knew anything of the South knew that no Kentucky colonel would have cooked the fried chicken in a southern household; the chicken in prosperous southern households, particularly in the Colonel’s era, was inevitably cooked by a black maid or family housekeeper. Colonel Sanders created an alternative reality in which the white planter not only ate the chicken but implicitly made it. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

[sic]

And part of his power was that people understood him as a man caught between eras. When he produced this most traditional of foods in a conspicuously ultramodern, space-age, high-tech restaurant that looked like nothing else on earth, the paradox was even plainer.

Truly a man between eras, and somehow this image transcends the generations. Despite people knowing it to be patently false, somehow, they’re willing to suspend their disbelief.

[H]is mania for cleanliness and good service, absorbed in the sternest of terms at his mother’s knee, was in stark contrast to rural menus and diners of that time. The amenities offered in the rural motel, such as a no-tipping policy, complimentary umbrellas and car tarps during inclement weather, and even free newspapers, absolutely awed visitors.

As with nearly every entrepreneurial story in fast food, it starts with quality first. Regardless of what these franchises are like today, at the time of their inception, they were significantly higher quality than their competition. This is a time when it was very routine for people to get sick eating out. Food poisoning was the norm. So when Sanders comes along and is a stickler for cleanliness in the kitchen, it might seem obvious today but compared to his competition it was truly standout.

Governor Ruby Laffoon appeared in a black limousine with a full police escort to check the place out. Even the travel writer Duncan Hines, not yet elevated to his own cake-baking immortality, included Sanders Cafe in his 1935 Adventures in Good Eating, the nation’s first road-food guide. In reality, the review is hardly a rave. Sanders Cafe, according to Hines, was “a very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies,” notable for its “sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, [and] hot biscuits.” The fried chicken is only mentioned in passing!

This is so funny. The thing he was most known for, originally, was the ambiance, the location, and the steaks!

The suit was originally black. It came with a string tie and was distinctive enough in its way, but something about it lacked oomph, panache. The Colonel, it is reckoned by his contemporaries, began wearing it around 1950, about the time of his second and final commission. The first, given him by Governor Ruby Laffoon, was a ceremonial decree that pleased Sanders briefly but was by no means defining. He even lost the certificate over the years, leading to his being granted a second one in 1949 by Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Weatherby.

The evolution of the iconic suit begins.

The rechristened Colonel Sanders even went so far as to have his beard bleached, as he was not yet old enough to have a white beard. He knew, though, that a paternal-looking southern gentleman was expected to have a white beard, and eventually he figured out that he would need a white suit, too.

Of course, it soon enough becomes the white one we all know.

He drove around in his white Cadillac and checked out a lot of restaurants, learning more about how the business was working, both regionally and nationally.

All white everything.

He was, in short, a success. But there was a terrible shadow to his prosperity. Harland Sanders had no son to pass on his business to; his son, Harland Jr., died at age twenty in 1932 of blood poisoning from a streptococcus germ picked up in the hospital, in one of those random tragedies so common in the years before the advent of antibiotics. Years later, when ruing his decision to sell Kentucky Fried Chicken, the senior Sanders would point to the absence of a male heir as one of the main reasons for that choice.

Like Trader Joe, Dunkin Donuts, and Burger Chef, he, too, is not happy once he sells his baby. Despite all the wealth it brings him, letting go of your life’s work is rarely worth it for monetary reasons.

Just when he was beginning to reap the rewards of a grueling life, disaster struck yet again, landing him penniless and jobless at the age of sixty-five.

This is the craziest part - he starts over at 65! This is the true birth of KFC.

U.S. 25 would be linked to the interstate, all right, but only after it was rerouted—away from Sanders Cafe. The business that he had built through unrelenting labor over twenty years became a dead issue more or less overnight.

[sic]

Now Sanders’ business was off the main road, a Bates Motel, and that was the end of the story. No amount of umbrella service or country ham could make a difference…

And thus the forcing function for KFC arrives.

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.

Like Munger says, trust is the greatest economic force. Franchising on handshake deals is probably the most efficient and proven engine to lift people out of poverty.

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.

[sic]

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.

Yup! Never was a military colonel.

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.

Claudia sticks with him until the end of his days, and they’re a much better match for each other. Mostly because I think Sanders has grown up a lot and is no longer a total loser.

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.

Quality quality quality quality. It is all about quality in food.

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.

The amount of energy to do this at 65 is amazing. As Estee Lauder says, it’s not about the age. It’s about the passion - that is what provides the energy.

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.

He was a natural born salesman.

Although the technology had been around in one form or another since the seventeenth century, pressure cooking never really hit it big in the United States until the Depression and then the war effort made home canning an economic necessity. There, in the stark and shabby kitchens of a million working-class homes, the machine was put to use making apple preserves or softening lentils. Like fried chicken, it was primarily a home technology as well.

[sic]

Modern pressure cookers were high-tech. No one was going to start a fast-food empire using cast-iron skillets, even if those were the best way to cook chicken. (And they are. Calvin Trillin has memorably written, with complete justice, that “a fried chicken cook with a deep fryer is a sculptor working with mittens.”)

[sic]

It’s not as if the pressure cooker was the obvious option. A fast-food restaurant can make as much fried chicken as it wants in minimal time by the expedient of just throwing the chicken into a deep fryer, a giant tank of boiling oil that stays at constant temperature. In fact, that’s what nearly every fast-food operation uses, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken, over the Colonel’s most strident objections, used the technology to create Extra Crispy chicken—which, to his bafflement and dismay, soon sold nearly as well as Original Recipe.

Food and technology are so inextricably linked.

In the early going, the pressure cooker was as much of the pitch as the proprietary seasoned flour or the Colonel’s image itself.

Amazing how much this has shifted to just focus on the 11 spices secret recipe.

Harman is the unheralded hero of the Kentucky Fried Chicken story, the company’s virtual cofounder. A quiet and unassuming man, more than anyone else he was the architect of Kentucky Fried Chicken Inc. Harman was the one who thought of the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. He conceived of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a stand-alone restaurant. He invented the bucket, which, after the Colonel himself, was the chain’s most recognizable symbol.

[sic]

He created the slogan “finger-lickin’ good,” which was likewise synonymous with the brand for most of its history. He remained a top figure in the hierarchy of the company through all its corporate owners. He was the first franchisee and the man who, it was felt by many, knew the Colonel best professionally.

Dave Thomas and Pete Harman actually worked together for quite some time! People don’t realize that Dave Thomas, along with Pete Harman, were phenomenal operators. After mastering chicken, Dave Thomas naturally goes on to found Wendy’s to take on beef.

Harman’s most lasting insight was in seeing, as the McDonald brothers did at about the same time in California, that the sit-down restaurant was a waste of time and effort, not to mention money.

Harman is the one who pushes KFC into fast food territory.

This insight would eventually lead another Sanders protégé, Dave Thomas, to invent the drive-in window, but that was still years in the future.

Yup! Also covered in Dave’s Way.

[T]he franchisees understood the business better than did the chain’s executives in their big white headquarters in Louisville. The franchisees were closer to the ground. When the two groups disagreed, the company could be brought to a standstill, as happened in the 1990s when Kentucky Fried Chicken, under a series of indifferent corporate owners, milked the chain for profits while ignoring the views of the most experienced franchisees, including Pete Harman himself. Harman, unthinkably, even became a plaintiff in a suit filed by the franchisees against the company during those darkest days.

Tale as old as time - the frontline workers always know the ground truth better. It’s why founders must mind the details.

There was Pete Harman with a handful of stores in distant Utah, the forerunners of all future Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. There was the Colonel, and there was Claudia. And that was it. The franchisees sent their checks in on the honor system, and the Colonel cashed them when he got around to it.

Trust as the greatest economic force!

The Colonel wasn’t content to just cash the checks, though; he was still a berserker in his pursuit of quality control and “doing things the right way.” He demanded as a condition of application that all new franchisees grant him the right to inspect their restaurants with the understanding that he could withdraw their franchises if they departed from his decrees.

Quality is everything. Everything.

The Colonel, having never been really successful as a businessman, having been in debt a good part of his life, and having a bone-deep distaste for people who had never done the kind of hard work that he had mastered at age twelve, was skeptical. He saw all “moneymen” as swindlers, usurers, and was notably gruff, even for him. He acted strangely uneasy. Brown remembers that he was “constantly muttering, pulling his moustache, stuff like that.”

[sic]

After much delay, the Colonel finally came out with it: “Let me tell you right now,” he said, “there ain’t no slick-talking sonofabitch going to come in here and buy my company out from under me. Nosir!” Both men were shocked. Neither had even considered the idea of buying Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Too funny - they’re literally just trying to advise him.

[T]here was a single reason above all the others, and it was this one that carried the day. He simply wasn’t able to run the business by himself. He could sell and promote anything under the sun, and he could make chicken like a champ. But he was no businessman, not at this age and not on this scale. “I’d been in business for myself for more than thirty-five years at one thing or another,” the Colonel later wrote, looking back at the fateful decision.

Time to sell, ultimately.

He would get $2 million in cash, more than he ever dreamed of, plus $40,000 a year to work as a goodwill ambassador, “the living symbol of Kentucky Fried Chicken.” (Later this would be upped to $75,000.) He didn’t take any stock, for tax reasons, but that didn’t bother him; he now had more money than he could ever spend. Cash was what he preferred anyway, cash on the barrel-head: $500,000 up front, payable within two months, and the rest paid over a five-year period. In other ways, the deal wasn’t that good. The Colonel, accustomed to a lifetime of handshake arrangements and leaving “the paperwork” for later, had agreed, he thought, to a sale in principal and had a few lawyer friends look at the contract. After he signed it, he found that the money wasn’t as amazing as he thought; in fact, given the payout schedule, it was less than he was making before the sale. His salary for a busy full-time job as the face of the brand was a relative pittance, and the company would even get to keep his residual royalties!

At the time, of course, he was plenty content with this deal. That would change later.

“Father had only himself to blame,” his daughter Margaret would later say. “Father’s hands were tied, and his lousy salary was hardly enough to compensate for the exhaustion he experienced from flying around the world making commercials.” Worse still, he had signed away the right to use his own name and image on any other business for the rest of his life.

Maybe you feel that way now, Margaret, but your father was very happy with this at the time.

The problem was that the Colonel wasn’t just making decisions on behalf of himself but rather his “family” of franchisees—a term he actually took seriously. Certainly there could be no sale without speaking to Pete Harman and Kenny King of Cleveland, the two biggest and earliest franchisees. To his surprise and possible dismay, they were all in favor of it. The major franchisees were going to get big chunks of stock, and the Colonel let himself believe that they would watch out for the other franchisees and the quality of the product, having been chicken men themselves, unlike shady moneymen who never knew what it was to mop up a restaurant at six in the morning.

Obviously everyone is in favor of the Colonel retiring, especially at his age.

[T]he business is yours to operate as you please, and I will never be critical to anyone other than you two about how you operate it. Anything that I suggest to you would be merely a suggestion, and no hard feelings on my part if they are not taken. There’s no question that Sanders believed this at the time, but no one with even a passing knowledge of his character could ever have believed that he could abide by it. This was a man who thought nothing of visiting strangers’ homes and running into the kitchen with a drill to bore holes in the gas range, a man who had made a lifelong habit of swearing at employees, his own and those of unlucky restaurant owners, and knocking any nearby surface with the end of his cane to indicate his displeasure at imperfectly cooked scrambled eggs. There was no way that the presence of this temperamental, stubborn, opinionated individual was going to be easy to control; the question was merely how volatile an asset the Colonel would be for the newly formed corporation.

Yup - attitudes change, and revisionist history is soon applied.

The initial public offering, ennobled by the Colonel’s presence on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, was an enormous hit. He bought the first hundred shares of Kentucky Fried Chicken at ten dollars a share and after a series of splits found himself selling them at a whopping four hundred dollars a share. Everyone wanted a piece of the new chain, and, at least at first, the confidence did not seem misplaced: within two years the chain opened more than 1,000 stores, 861 in 1968 alone, and brought in over $100 million in total sales. The effect on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s infrastructure was a kind of irrational exuberance. Twenty-one employees were made “instant millionaires”

Nice!

The general feeling seemed to be that they had “made it” and that they ought to just keep the money coming in by opening more Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. The executives “became a bunch of prima donnas,” Brown recollects, adding that his wife at the time urged him to fire everybody. But firing large sectors of the staff just as they had accomplished a great feat after much labor, endless hours, and great personal sacrifice was no more Brown’s way than it would have been the Colonel’s.

Oof. The culture starts to sour as soon as the entitlement creeps in.

The idea of a fried chicken restaurant being traded on the New York Stock Exchange would have seemed patently insane to anyone in the 1920s, when it was understood that the proper concerns of large corporations were vast and impersonal enterprises like railroads, mining, and steel. All that changed when McDonald’s went public in 1965. It was an immediate success, splitting over and over again. As a result, soon every major chain became attractive to large corporations seeking profitable businesses to fit into their portfolios. Often these were food companies like Pillsbury, which acquired Burger King in 1967, and General Foods, which bought Burger Chef the same year.

How the times change.

The Colonel, predictably, was devastated. Previously, the headquarters had been an office adjacent to his home in Shelbyville. He and Claudia had launched the business there. It was a cold, hard reality for him to face, and he didn’t take to it well. Sanders had despised Massey pretty much from the first. The move cemented his loathing. He was therefore primed and paranoid and all too ready to believe a rumor he heard that one of Massey’s people had suggested getting rid of the Colonel by cutting his pension and thus maneuvering him into quitting.

[sic]

The Colonel proceeded to excoriate management for more than forty minutes.

[sic]

The Colonel went on and on. Massey, who was seated on his right, turned red and was burning up. Brown was covered with sweat. It was a dark moment and, really, one of the Colonel’s most ignoble acts. Massey and Brown had paid him a generous amount for his business, and he had sworn in the most earnest and solemn terms never to criticize them; now he was attempting to humiliate them publicly in the most awkward possible place and time.

Mind you, this was in public! In front of all the franchisees! Yikes. But management was calm and collected. Do not interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

“I saw everything going up in smoke,” he would later tell John Ed Pearce. “Here, in what was supposed to be our hour of victory, our leader, our symbol, had turned against us. And I knew good and well that if these people believed him, if he left us and turned them against us, our company was shot.”

I don’t blame him at all.

Colonel, let me say this: when you sold this company to us, you asked us to be fair and honorable, and we have been. We haven’t had a single lawsuit. There is not one single person who can say that we haven’t honored every promise, every contract we have made. If there is anyone here who has any complaint, who feels he has been treated unfairly, we haven’t heard of it, and we want to hear of it.

They genuinely were fair to him.

The Colonel, still thinking the crowd was with him, grabbed the microphone and asked for a show of hands. None went up.

It’s sad to see, but he really lost touch by the end.

He ended by turning to his vanquished attacker and saying, “Colonel, you’re still our leader. You’ll always be our leader. And I give you my word that we’re going to make this company all you want it to be and more.” The room erupted in applause. Most of the crowd knew the Colonel well and saw his intemperate attack as just hotheadedness. None were prepared to take arms against the company that was making them rich, however. Even the Colonel knew he had been in the wrong. “Well, John, you did a good job last night,” he told Brown. The two men never spoke of it again and even remained friendly, although the Colonel always believed that he had been swindled, or pretended to believe it, anyway.

Incredible.

His dream, the American Dream, of fame and fortune regardless of rank had come true; but the price of it had been the erasure of his identity. And he knew it.

That’s what happens when you sell your life’s work. It happens to too many entrepreneurs.

The company passed Howard Johnson as the leading food dispenser in America, excluding only the Army, the Navy, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s school lunch program.

Heck of an achievement!

No entity as singularly and spectacularly successful as Kentucky Fried Chicken could fail to inspire imitators. Much as the novel success of White Castle earlier in the century inspired a nationwide wave of clones with variant DNA—White Tower, Blue Castle, Royal Castle, White Manna, White Diamond—Kentucky Fried Chicken inspired a flurry of get-rich-quick schemes looking to cash in on the fried-chicken craze. There was All-Pro Chicken, Chicken Hut, Maryland Fried Chicken, Ozark Fried Chicken with “Miss Alma’s Recipe,” Cock-A-Doodle of America, Pail-O-Chicken, and Wife-Saver Chicken.

[sic]

A few, like the New Orleans–based Popeye’s and the Charlotte-based Bojangles, survive and have carved out a niche for themselves—Popeye’s offering a spicy Cajun flavor and Bojangles emphasizing breakfast service.

Competition and immitators will always come. The only question is how do you make your business durable.

Brown, having no special attachment to chicken, assumed that since people liked Kentucky Fried Chicken, they would also like Kentucky Roast Beef. The Colonel’s Beef was launched in 1969. People didn’t dislike it, but it had none of the lightning-in-a-bottle electricity of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and after some initial success, the venture collapsed, leaving a hundred stores shuttered.

The tale is the same everytime - management does not understand why the initial venture took off. KFC was differentiated against the burger chains - if I wanted beef, I had three other more well-known brands to go to.

The magic of franchise fees was found to give an initial but illusory boost to stock values. All too often the franchisee was a cashbox for the franchising company, a mark who paid through the nose for the right to operate and who was little concerned thereafter. McDonald’s was an exception to this practice with its low franchising fees and iron control of operations; but most other chains showed less foresight and paid heavily after the initial fees stopped rushing in.

This is why McDonald’s is the greatest.

“The recipe is such a tightly held secret that not even [the CEO] knows its full contents. Only two company executives at any time have access to the recipe. KFC won’t release their names or titles, and it uses multiple suppliers who produce and blend the ingredients but know only a part of the entire contents.” The only problem is that nobody is really sure that Kentucky Fried Chicken is using it. The Colonel insisted over and over again during his lifetime that it had been changed, that it didn’t taste the same, that the new owners were cutting corners. William Poundstone, in his 1983 book Big Secrets, claimed that the current version consisted entirely of salt, pepper, and MSG. Many customers maintain that the taste of the Original Recipe today is not the same one they recall from the 1960s and ’70s. It’s impossible to say, of course, and subjective taste, particularly when time and nostalgia are involved, are notoriously unreliable. The question of whether KFC still uses the eleven herbs and spices, though, is a profound one. Without it the brand essentially ceases to exist, which is one reason the company has been zealously protective of the recipe over the years.

My personal conspiracy theory is that it definitely changed, and likely for the better. Food science has advanced so much that there is almost no chance the original recipe is better than the modern one. But then again, it’s also just as likely it was only changed for cost-cutting reasons. Still, it seems very likely to have changed for one reason or another.

“Let’s face it, the Colonel’s gravy was fantastic, but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it,” an unnamed executive told The New Yorker magazine in a 1970 profile of the Colonel. “It involved too much time, it left too much room for human error, and it was too expensive.” The writer noted, “This attitude is incomprehensible to the Colonel.” If that was the attitude of Brown and company, the subsequent owners of the company had even less compunction about price controls.

This is probably the likeliest reason.

When not “stepped on” with an overwhelming flour-to-spice ratio, the seasoning is much stronger and more fragrant and reminiscent of what many old-timers insist is the original taste of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a blast from the company’s precorporate past. The story behind 99X is that the Colonel, unhappy with the taste of the spice mix then being supplied by McCormick, approached Marion-Kay Spices founder Bill Summers, who is said to have “cracked the code” of the eleven herbs and spices and possibly to have improved it. That was the Colonel’s view, in any case, and he is said by numerous parties to have recommended it to franchisees, resulting in the aforementioned suit. What is not in question is that Kentucky Fried Chicken sued Marion-Kay for infringement on its franchising monopoly rights, which led to the discontinuation of the arrangement. Happily for fried-chicken lovers everywhere, however, 99X is still available online. The origin of the name comes from Summers’ having tweaked the mix very slightly; it refers to the mix being 99 percent identical to the original with the “X” representing the tweak…

I’ll leave it to the tinfoil hatters to continue the argument from here.

In many ways, Kentucky Fried Chicken had it much easier than McDonald’s. While the hamburger was a uniquely American food, invented in the United States essentially from whole cloth, chicken is a universal human food. Beginning in antiquity as a South Asian jungle fowl, it is kept and eaten everywhere in the world. The fried-chicken tradition of the American South, with its communal connotations and complicated racial history, may not have meant anything to the citizens of Bahrain or Beijing. But the people there ate chicken, and they ate salt, and they ate fried, crunchy things of varying degrees of spiciness, and so Kentucky Fried Chicken made sense in a way that its burger-based rivals didn’t.

This is what makes KFC’s modern day decline all the more depressing. They really were positioned to be the ultimate.

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.

Oh man I remember this ad campaign. Insanity.

It wasn’t a case of simple mismanagement or misjudgment; the problem was systemic. There was no founder to demand things be done his way; there was no single person with the authority that had died with the Colonel.

Absent the founder, the ship starts to drift.

[T]he rock bottom of the campaign came buried in the language of the press release itself, which was held up to ridicule in Slate. “In a particularly brilliant maneuver, KFC’s press release further suggests that you can make its chicken even more healthy by removing the skin.” The company, whose whole existence was based on fried chicken and the eleven secret herbs and spices that lay impressed upon its skin, suggested taking the skin off. Taking the skin off! If the Colonel hadn’t been dead, this surely would have killed him.

This chapter of the book literally has 5 different references to ‘rock bottom’.

For the thousandth time, the company was told, as it had been by the Colonel, Pete Harman, the franchisees, the public, and everybody else, that the problem wasn’t the marketing or the slogan or who their latest rival was or that the food was fried rather than grilled. The problem was one of bad faith. It was easy for people outside of KFC’s corporate culture to sense that those inside that culture were apologizing for the product rather than promoting it.

Truly sad.

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The crazy thing is that, despite everything, KFC is still ranked third in brand value - behind McDonalds (by a mile) and Starbucks. It’s still doing great - despite all the fumbles and mismanagement. This unlikely 65 year old started what would become a global icon. Proof that you’re never too late to do something great in your life. Do be sure to have a proper succession plan in place, though.