Pizza Hut: Eight Letters and Six Hundred Dollars
Near Wichita, Kansas
In nineteen fifty-eight, two brothers who were students at Wichita State University borrowed six hundred dollars from their mother and opened a pizza restaurant. The space was a small building at the corner of Bluff and Kellogg. A local real estate agent who had an unrented building had convinced them that pizza was a promising business. They were skeptical but out of better ideas.
The brothers were Frank and Dan Carney, and the name they chose for the restaurant was partly a matter of arithmetic. Their sign had room for exactly eight letters. They wanted the word pizza in the name. That left four more letters. The word hut fit. On May thirty-first, nineteen fifty-eight, Pizza Hut opened for the first time.
They began franchising a year later, first to friends and acquaintances who could be trusted to maintain standards. Within a decade there were more than three hundred locations. In nineteen sixty-nine the Carneys took the company public. By nineteen seventy-one, Pizza Hut had more locations and higher sales than any competitor in the pizza industry. By nineteen seventy-seven, the chain had grown to four thousand outlets and the brothers sold it to PepsiCo for over three hundred million dollars.
The original building at Bluff and Kellogg was eventually moved to the campus of Wichita State University, where it now operates as the Original Pizza Hut Museum, the only Pizza Hut in the world that does not sell pizza. It sells memorabilia and history. The company that started here grew into the largest pizza chain on the planet by the nineteen eighties. Six hundred dollars borrowed from a mother is now roughly a hundred countries' worth of franchise locations. It is not a bad return.
