Please hit the Like button👍, Thank You for your Support. In this video, I am going to discuss what led to the decline of Rax Roast Beef, and how Mr. Delicious was the nail in the coffin.
Worked at Rax as a manager while they were kicking this idea around. My GM and I said this was the dumbest idea ever but all they would say is, "We paid a lot of money to an advertising agency to come up with this so it has to be good." Showed us mock ups of him driving a car, walking with his briefcase, etc. All of them had his "catchy" phrase: 'You Can Eat Here!' It wasn't really the nail in the coffin as they were going down hill for awhile before that. They would have gone out of business with or without Mr. D. (Man, I haven't thought of that idiot for ages!) I would sit with my employees for hours almost every night with no customers. Then Hardee's bought them out, but that's another failure story.
It sounds like the real problem was incompetent management, and the commercials were simply another symptom of incompetent decision-making by incompetent managers.
@@joeschembrie9450 It could be, or people were liking Arby's better or anything. I would tour other Rax stores and they were pretty much the same. We'd have lunch rushes and, very rarely, dinner crouds and just nothing else. Every store was pretty much losing money all over the place. We had a good, loyal customer base for the first year or so I worked and it just started dropping away. Tried a "hot bar" with mashed potatoes, wings, nachos, etc. but that didn't work either.
As a Gen-X-er, and an animator, I find Mr. D hilarious. BUT in the 90s, that would not have driven me to ANY fast food chain. Not because he wasn't funny, but because Gen-X-ers didn't really love fast food restaurants by the time we got to our 20s. I don't think that advertising firm was wrong in designing that character, I just think that the industry was failing to realize that a Gen-X-friendly approach wasn't going to lead to widespread Gen-X patronage.
The then CEO of Rax was recently interviewed about this, and he said that this ad campaign was a big success. It did go viral, without the help of the internet. The problem is that Rax was already so deep in debt that Mr D ads just couldn't save the company. It was too little too late. Gen X humor? Gen X were mostly teenagers at this time. These ads 100% were trying to appeal to professional Baby Boomers. The ads did exactly what they were intended to do, it got people talking about the ads. Some people loved the ads, some hated them. Some loved the ads but acted like they were offended. BTW, the CEO said in his interview that he thought that the delicate surgery was for hemmroids, not a vasectomy.
Mr D was laying down the D in bora bora with those young ladies. He is on he's second marriage and don't need any pregnancy scares.. Hence the surgery.🤔
Gen X was born 1965-1980 and we started hearing about it in 1992. Most were in their 20s at the time, and more Hip-Hop and alternative than what Mr. Delicious was. We might have related in the late 2000s however, lol.
I googled rax... As of 2024, Rax is based in Ironton, Ohio, and has only six franchisee-owned restaurants still in operation.... That's why i didn't realise Rax was gone. I live where the last few stores are based. The strange thing is i don't recall the Mr D commercials at all.
I definitely went to a Rax in Illinois after their 1997 bankruptcy and similarly have no memory of them ever advertising at all. Honestly with the salad bar I did not even totally realize it was fast food as a kid
Ironton is the next town over from me and I lived there briefly as a child. I had no idea that's where Rax is based now. Just goes to show the shape they're in as a business. It's all Arby's around here anyhow; I don't know how Rax is staying afloat.
@@Write-Stuff i am from coalgrove. i don't live there now but i used to help clean the carpets in rax on 3rd st. in ironton every friday night from 1995 till 2001.
Just seeing the commercials makes me slightly nostalgic for the late 70s/early 80s when every restaurant seemed to have a solarium with plants, a salad bar, and faux Tiffany lamps.
Wow, when people said that Rax 'didn't know what it wanted to be', they weren't kidding. The story of how it was founded already had red flags considering they couldn't even settle on a NAME when they first opened.
That said, Rax is apparently a mix of the chain's previous names, JAX and RIX. I could see how all the name changes led to branding problems. Four name changes in a decade (JAX -> RIX -> JAX again -> Rax) seems concerning, and probably made it hard to establish a consistent brand until Rax started expanding to areas where it hadn't been known as JAX or RIX.
My hometown has the only Rax in the state of Kentucky. It's such a staple here that I didn't realize it was part of a defunct chain until a year or so ago.
I'm over in Lee Co VA and went to Harlan many times as a kid where my dad worked in the mines over there. My 90 yr old neighbor loves that place still to this day.
Rax existed in the Tampa Bay area, where I grew up. I remember the mediocre salad bars but, most of all, those awful solariums built into the front of each restaurant. Because peninsular Florida is basically a hotter version of a rainforest for most of the year, those solariums were miserable places in the building to eat and the plexiglass on them quickly became scratched and faded in short order. Basically, a terrible idea.
I wonder if they figured that their target demographic was middle-aged, drunk, depressed men with a history of relationship problems, and Mr. D came to life as a result.
I feel like the challenge to marketing yourself as as a calmer, more mature place to eat fast food is that you're trying to thread the needle of people who both find other fast food venues too chaotic but haven't also selected to just take their food home, eat in their car, go to a public space or any other option. Couple that with trying to do that in the USoA, which has an extensive history and network of diners that do exactly that already and you're trying to pass a VERY tight market.
My cousin owns the Rax franchise now. There are several restaurants in Southern Ohio & Northern Kentucky. After seeing this, I went yesterday & purchased a BBC. Delicious!😋 🇺🇸✌🏻😎
I can't believe one of the few remaining locations is in Chicagoland. Growing up here, I never had heard of this place until seeing one downstate many years ago
@@brulesrulesforyourhealth5928 you managed to make me happy for you and jealous at the same time! 😂🤣😂 Good for you! Please enjoy the shake for the rest of us out here crying when we drive past Arby’s. 🥰😂
It's a perfect Gen X commercial. The problem is in 1992 there was a recession and most of young Gen X'ers were out of work and/or short on money. So even if the commercial was a success, its target demographic didn't have any money. It's a marketing failure, not so much a failure of the commercial.
@@garrettedwardspears Oh right, I forgot that recessions turn off like a light switch and there isn't any lingering effects for years afterward. That's why the recession had absolutely no effect on the 1992 election.... right??? Everyone loved George Bush Sr., didn't blame him for the recession and promptly reelected him.... right??? Just like how the Great Recession promptly ended in June 2009 and everything was back to normal in 2010.... right??? GTFO with your wikipedia history cut n paste, I actually lived it.
Yes, thank you for that! I thought I was the only one that remembered Uncle Ally back when I was a kid in the 80s. Then the Rax in my area became a Wendy's in the mid 90s---funny enough, they left up the solarium, the salad bar configuration and the glass with the white embossed bamboo print until that Wendy's became a dunkin' donuts in the early 2000s
@@steve9833 The BBC was one of the most common sandwich with the cheese sauce as I liked to called it. Their Cheese melt was really the best thing they had. And yes it was better than Arbys at that time and Era
I used to love going to Rax. The one closest to me finally closed permanently during the pandemic. They had changed the name to Rancher's Roast Beef a few years prior, but it was the exact same food.
Yeah, I loved the Philly cheese steak. I guess I was around when Rax was at their peak, then I moved out of the Midwest and there was no longer a Rax where I lived. I remember them fondly.
Thank you for showing this video. I remember when they put a Rax Roast Beef in the town, but it did not last long and was turned into a bank within like two years. When I ask people if they remember Rax Roast Beef, most people in the town do not. I then wondered what happened to Rax. Plus I started to question my own memory when others did not remember it. So thank you. :)
2:51 This to me sounds like the real reason they ended as a fast-food chain, and it is a classic sign of a business overextending themselves (and likely going into debt trying to do so).The commercial is merely a symptom of their overall dysfunction.
McDonald's barely wants you ordering from a person, having those digital booths inside of them. It's pretty uninviting, even after the fact that I don't eat their food.
Did that sign at the 6:09 mark really say starting pay was $16 an hour? I know what I see, but I find it so hard to believe that a fast food place payed that much back then. What fast food even pays that these days? They sure don’t where I live, anyway. I’ve seen some that pay above minimum wage, maybe $14 an hour, but $16 is crazy. Especially for when this took place. That’s insane.
That pics of the Illinois store, and only a couple years old. Rax as a company doesn't really exist anymore, but they're still around because one franchisee - Rich Donohue - bought what was left of the company instead of shutting down his restaurants 😆
I LOVE how most of your stock photos of Rax are of the one in Joliet IL where I grew up and was my go to fast food. There is even an Arby like across the street from it and Rax is still the local favorite. Yeah, it doesn't have the salad bar, but I still go there, the locals still love it and its still beloved and talked about on the Joliet facebook page. It's a gem. I'm 36 and I've been eating there since I was a kid. ❤️ Rax over Arby's any day
“You can eat here” as a tagline for a restaurant would be like Co-Cola going with “Mostly carbonated water, okay to drink” or any car company going with “It’s got four wheels and it moves.”
I’m sorry I didn’t see this message until three days ago. I think he would be successful today because you have cartoons on adult swim that mimic this character and I work for Walmart that’s why I made that comment about the straight talk mascot because they kept playing the same stuff on their televisions in the store to try to get rid of Motorola phones that were not selling. But then again I’m gonna make up a joke. Maybe Walmart should resurrect this character and then that can be their mascot and let’s see how they do.
You mean you are an American who happens to have some Italian heritage? I hardly think that an Italian would find such degrading and disrespectable appropriation the least bit acceptable let alone humorous.
@@victorconway444 All americans do is mock things and persons different from they are all the time. ALL THE TIME! Our sense of humor is not to make others the subject of fun at expense of they or marginalize persons who are of the minority. Pleased to have explain how that is good humor.
LMAO holy shit. Wow. I gotta say that today is the first time that I ever heard of Rax in my life. I guess I can see why. I was a very young child in the early 90s, which is where the narrator says that the company became obscure. That Mr. D character reminds me of something you would have seen as an adult cartoon on Comedy Central in the 90s.
So my childhood Wendys was previously an Rax, guessing from how it was built with that same glass roof in the front. It was our teen hang out spot when it rained, and we had to wait to walk home. Also seeing that drive thru menu was another confirmation and him saying they bought the company completed the mystery full circle. Thanks !!
They should have marketed the 1967 grand opening with the slogan _‘You’ve heard of summer BBQ, well Rax Roastbeef is here to serve you through The Long Hot Summer’!_ and then it shows a hooded figure being shooed away from the patio ‘We don’t burn things black around here!’
I definitely miss the old, simple Rax Roast Beef sandwich and their excellent fries. Their roast beef was every bit as good as Arby's and all they had to do was not "complicate" the menu. I'll never understand the "suits" who come in to a successful fast food restaurant then, wreck it by adding garbage nobody asked for or wanted and change the perfect foods that do not need changing...WENDY'S! IM LOOKING RIGHT AT YOU! Wendy's was once my favorite American Burger place. They had the best, most tastiest beef patties and THE BEST FRENCH FRIES IN THE BUSINESS. That's right, I said it, Wendy's Fries were even better than McDonald's fries and that's saying something even if most people disagree. As long as Dave Thomas was around Wendy's succeeded and thrived in a most competitive marketplace because of the simplicity and outstanding quality of their menu and Wendy's ORIGINAL French Fries were as important as their awesome burgers. After Dave passed away some jackass in a suit decided they should change the Fries, probably to save a few pennies and thus began the slow, steady decline and ruination of my favorite Burger Place. Yes, the Fries are that important because together with the beef patties & Frosty they created their own unique "Flavor Profile". As soon as you change one of those items you change the entire Flavor Profile and not for the better. And now Wendy's is doing breakfast.....and I don't give a ding-dang-doodly darn about that garbage. I'm from the 1970s, I'm fit, strong & healthful and I don't eat breakfast and I WANT MY SQUARE BURGER & MY ORIGINAL FRIES BACK! So, thanks for nothing, Wendy's suits. You've ruined an American icon & destroyed the work & passion of Dave Thomas who gave us quality burgers & Fries & the Frosty. May your greed and lack of vision lead you where you deserve to be....jerks.
As a member of GEN X… that commercial would have literally done nothing for me. The commercial, it’s self, the animation, feels like it came out of the 70’s, and far from in a good way.
1. those six stores should band together and come up with a new logo that doesn't smell like secondhand tobacco 2. your channel name sounds like the brand of some generic power strip, wall shelf, or aftermarket vacuum cleaner part on amazon 3. your sticker cuts off the "mr. d" on his suitcase a good video, thank you.
I don’t think the idea was to like Mr. D. I think it’s more like this miserable guy, whose life sucks, and who hates everything even likes and has good things to say about Rax. I guess a contemporary version would have a cartoon “Karen” giving a glowing review of her satisfaction with a business’s costumer service.
I knew Rax wasn’t very popular, but I didn’t realize there were only 6 left! I’m an Ohioan and there are 2 Rax’s in my area which is pretty nuts considering that’s 1/3 of the entire franchise
6:15- Given the dates of the bankruptcy and whatnot, that picture would of been taken circa 1992/3. So $16/hr pay is about $35 in 2024 dollars. That would be one of the big reasons they weren't making much profit.
0:31 I used to work at Rax restaurant on the turnpike in Vickery Ohio many years ago. They tore down the building where the Rax restaurant used to be. And it’s completely changed since then. They have many different restaurants there now.
I live near one of the last Rax locations in Joliet, IL. Going there is like going into a time warp. I’m not a fan of the food, but love the bizarre history.
There were 2 in my area back in the day. The one in my hometown of Marietta, OH closed in 2007. The one down the road in Parkersburg, WV closed in 2013. I really liked Rax. I thought the salad bars were great. You are right, they were trying to be everything.
