Kentucky Fried Coincidence
As Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman says, frequently we underestimate the role of luck in our successes.
To illustrate this, consider the case of a Corbin, Kentucky gas
station owner named Harlan Sanders. One day, while working in his station on U.S.
Highway 25, he happened to hear a customer complain, “Damn! There ain’t a
decent place around here to eat!” Sanders, who had bounced from job to job for
years, would later remember, “I got to thinking. One thing I could always do
was cook.”
Smithsonian magazine reports what happened next. Sanders remodeled the store room of his station
into a restaurant, where weary travelers could order country ham, mashed
potatoes, biscuits, and fried chicken.
By 1953, business was going so well that the café had been
expanded to accommodate 142 eaters, and Sanders was offered $164,000 for his
Corbin business—which he promptly refused. (about 1.5 million in today's money)That same year, Sanders met
entrepreneur Pete Harman at a restaurant convention, and Harman agreed to go
into business as Sander’s first franchisee.
It must have been easy to believe that Sanders’s success was
the inevitable result of his hard work and excellent product. But three years
later, he was broke and unemployed.
In 1956, U.S. Highway 25 was routed just 7 miles west of Corbin,
and that steady stream of customers dried up. Where just three years before,
Sanders had glibly turned down $164,000 for his business, now he had to auction
it at a loss for $75,000. However good his chicken might have been, a slight
tweak of the map could still spell the difference between profit and ruin.
Sanders decided to redouble his franchising efforts, driving
to small establishments to make his pitch and sleeping in his car. Luckily for
Sanders, this worked out well, dispersing the risk of any particular location
suffering the fate of Corbin—and allowing Sanders to benefit from the ideas of
others.
Meeting Pete Harman at that restaurant convention turned out
to be a stroke of excellent luck for Sanders. Harman engineered, among other
things, the concept of a chain of standardized eateries, the carryout meal
including chicken in “bucket” form, the slogan “finger-licking good,” and yes,
the name “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
Without Harman’s innovations, KFC would be unrecognizable at
best, and unsuccessful at worst.
And still, for those of us tempted to give too much credit
to Sanders’s secret recipes, here’s an important little morsel: after Sanders
sold the franchise, KFC began to retool its food, much to the Colonel’s
chagrin.
In fact, in 1975, the then-parent company tried and failed
to sue Sanders for libel, for comments like this, quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal:
“My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20
cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up
with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I've
seen my mother make it. ... There's no nutrition in it and they ought not to be
allowed to sell it.”
A bitter end, perhaps, for that most fortunate of chicken
magnates. But no matter what, his fingerprints remain all over the American
culinary landscape—plentiful, spirited and just a little greasy.
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