A&W - Building a Business

this video is sponsored by empower it's an app that'll help you save money and it'll help you budget money I've been using it for a while and it's free to download it simply go to empower mes slash company man the link is in the description this is a and double use mascot the great root beer bear it's a little hard to say you want to know his name Rudy I figured I'd use this adorable cleverly named character to capture your attention because I doubt this as a topic you've been dying to hear about I look through all the comments and topic submissions and couldn't find a single one requesting I talk about a and W this is something I found on my own and you're just going to have to trust me when I say this is a good topic in fact here's three reasons I wanted to talk about them for one there's an W root beer in the stores but then there's an A & W restaurant what's going on with that this might be the most successful instance of a product being sold in stores that started from a restaurant sure you have the White Castle frozen burgers and the fries from checkers but those hardly compare to this and W is a very popular soda and easily among the leaders in root beer brands if you can think of an example of something like this that's more successful I'd like to hear it the second reason is a and W is arguably the first restaurant chain and the first drive-in restaurant I say arguably because what constitutes a restaurant chain or a drive-in restaurant is debatable I don't want to take part in that debate but even if they weren't the first they were one of the first predating practically any fast-food chain that you can name they started in June of 1919 and after doing some math I learned they're only months away from celebrating 100 years of business and finally the third reason I wanted to talk about them is because they use one of those and symbols in their name called an ampersand it's shift 7 on the keyboard but they're also fun to draw it gave me an excuse to draw a few all right this reason may not have been as compelling but the first two were pretty strong are you at least interested to hear more about a and W at this point and that's only the beginning you're probably interested in hearing what a and W stands for cuz I wouldn't exactly call that common knowledge the a stands for Allen because Roy Allen was the guy who started everything almost a hundred years ago the thing that I respect most about this guy is his ability to see the change in the world around him and then take advantage of it one of the reasons I say this is the drive-ins I mentioned earlier it was 1921 and he was implementing a - possibly even inventing it cars were fairly new to the general public and nowhere near as popular as they are today but they were still starting to change the way the world functioned he was among the first to recognize this and capitalize on it in his own way his initial locations were in the Sacramento area so picture this you're driving around in the Sacramento Heat in your fancy new car and you see a stand up ahead where they'll deliver you some ice cold root beer straight to your car I would stop and get some it's essentially the adults version of a kids lemonade stand both great ideas the other way that Roy Allen saw the change in the world and took advantage of it was through the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920s and part of the 30s it was illegal to manufacture sell or transport alcohol it was a huge thing it's the eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution and Roy Allen took advantage of it the prohibition started in January of 1920 and if you remember and W started just a few months earlier in June of 1919 and even though he didn't sell anything alcoholic he did sell something with beer in its name root beer I would say that all of that is coincidence but he took advantage of the opportunity by serving it at mugs and setting up a bar with stools and just creating the atmosphere of a tavern I don't know if he was somehow tricking the customers into thinking it was alcoholic or simply just offering the next best thing by creating a bit of an illusion even root beer itself was invented many years earlier but it was initially given the name for similar reasons just to make it sound more enticing and attract more customers when looking back at the 1920s two of the most significant parts of the decade were the rising popularity of cars in the prohibition of alcohol both of which were used to the advantage of a and W now the W in a and W is a little less important to the story it stands for right named after Frank Wright very early on Roy Allen brought him on as a partner to help him expand that's when they came up with the name and everything but then four years later Roy Allen bought back Frank share of the company that's about it I had much more to say about the aid than the W I don't want to minimize Frank Wright's contribution to their success but the main guy here definitely seems to be Roy Allen that was the start that's how the company got off the ground by the end of the decade they were a well-established business now I'm going to start going faster and skipping around a little bit all the way to 1950 because that ends the involvement of Roy Allen at this point he was approaching 70 years old his wife had just gotten sick at the time there were 450 A&W locations he sold it to someone you wouldn't know so I'm just going to make another jump to the 1970s the owners at this point were called United brands now up until this point over 50 years of existence a and W was only sold in restaurants meaning it wasn't sold in stores in the early 1970s is when United brands finally decided to do it they started by first offering their original root beer who quickly became the leader of the root beer market they followed it up with their sugar free kind which later became their diet root beer a little later in the 1980s they introduced their cream soda and Diet cream sodas but in the 1970s when they started all this it led to some changes because that's how I hold a frosty mug of A&W United brands essentially separated the two businesses into two different subsidiaries and they eventually sold both of them to two different companies so if you were wondering if the restaurants and the bottles that you see in the stores were all part of the same company the answer is no but they were briefly in the 1970s from this point we're talking about two different businesses to simplify things I'll call one of them anw beverages and the other anw restaurants first let's follow the path of a and W beverages in 1993 a company existed called Cadbury Schweppes among other things they were pretty big into soft drinks in foreign markets and we're looking to enter the American market they did it by paying three hundred and thirty four million dollars to buy anw beverages and then three years later they also bought dr. pepper 7up which actually made them the number one provider of soft drinks in the American market not much has changed from then until today the company that owns them today is called Snapple dr. pepper which recently merged with Keurig so I suppose it's now called pure egg dr. pepper it's it's just hard to say these things properly without getting caught up in the details to try to make it a little simpler today the people who own dr. pepper also own a and W and it's been that way for a while now following the path of a and W restaurants and I'm sorry to say this is also easy to get caught up in the details but bear with me in the late 1990s the fast-food fish restaurant Long John Silver's was in trouble and aim W bought it for over two hundred million dollars the company that was formed by the merger was then bought in 2002 by Yum Brands which is another company that can easily get a side tracked but I'm staying on course as much as I can their big plan was to own a bunch of fast food restaurants and start putting them together in the same building so if you've seen an A & W can buy with the long john silver's or pizza hut combined with a Taco Bell or whatever this is where that comes from but today you won't see an A&W combined with anything because after nine years YUM decided to sell them they sold it because it wasn't really helping the other brands or bringing in the money and the customers like they had hope it honestly was never even a big part of their business and plus they wanted to expand internationally and a and W wasn't helping much in that department it's a very American brand they even used the slogan all-american food in 2011 YUM sold a and W to a group of franchisees who currently own their restaurant chain in an attempt to learn about the current state of their restaurants I went to their franchising website which I realize is trying to convince me to open a franchise so of course I'd leave with a good impression but they state that they're up 33 percent in same store sales growth on average since 2011 and that's pretty good I know I may have started rushing things at the end there it started involving all these other massive companies that easily deserve their own videos so I was careful to keep things specific to a and W for today but you have to admit it I was right this was a fantastic topic for a video there's an interesting foundation started by an innovative businessman and closely connected to American culture it split into two separate companies both of which I think we can call successful and we can't forget the ampersand let me know in the comments did you think that there was so much behind this brand my guess is that most of the viewers were aware of the root beer they sell in the stores but may not have been aware of the restaurants they're not exactly one of the most popular food chains out there but they are one of the oldest and in my opinion one of the most interesting and by the way if you're from Canada most of this doesn't apply to you as of 1971 the restaurant that you know as a NW is completely different from one I've been talking about it's been separate owners the logos even a little bit different so I'm sorry about that Canada I didn't mean to mislead you but any thoughts you have about w beverages or anw restaurants even the Canadian version leave them in the comments I'd like to hear what you have to say and I want to talk more about today's sponsor empower it's an app I have on my phone and I use it quite a bit see I don't know how you manage your apps but I put the ones that I use a lot on that first page and all the overflow gets pushed over to the second well empower is on that front page and here's the feature that I use the most the monthly report it's a visual breakdown of the money you have coming in and the money you have going out these aren't my actual numbers but right here it says over fourteen hundred dollars was spent on groceries that would be alarming for me so I would drill in on it and see why 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Channel: Company Man

Views: 582,404

Keywords: A&W, A and W, Soda, Business Origin, Dr. Pepper, Fast Food, Taco Bell

Id: p_I6aN-JF88

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mocodity]

I didn't know A&W started in the US, and that it wasn't a locally Canadian thing. I mean, it still is. I learned that in 1995 managers bought out the A&W brand in Canada, and their base is now in Vancouver, which is pretty neat.

Seems like all the baby boomers in Western Canada have fond memories of the drive-in. My mom was a waitress (first job) in hot pants, and met my dad (Camaro driver) there in the 70s, for example.