FICTION · An Unfair Advantage Intervention
Fiction. Real history. Sourced below.
If standardisation causes calcification, McDonald’s should be dead. It is more standardised than Howard Johnson’s ever was, and it has changed continuously for sixty years. So consistency did not kill Howard Johnson’s. What killed it was which layer the consistency was applied to.
I tear down competitors’ operating models for a living, and I held the standard reading of this case for years: that the machinery guaranteeing the same product everywhere is what made the company unable to change. Then I ran the same teardown on the chain that replaced it and the reading broke, because McDonald’s has more standardisation, more enforcement, and more central control, and it reinvents itself every decade.
Full fiction disclosure and sourcing note
Claire Anderson is a fictional character from The Unfair Advantage by Todd Hagopian, analyzing the documented history of Howard Johnson’s from the present day. She has never met, advised, or corresponded with Howard Johnson, who died in 1972, or anyone else named here, and no dialogue, thought, or motive is invented for any real person. Facts come from the public record and are accurate as of 2026; the analysis is invented. One point is flagged: the operating manual’s widely repeated nickname is described here rather than quoted, as it could not be confirmed against a primary source.
- 1935: What the Manual Actually Standardised
- 1955 to 1975: Which Layer Gets Hardened
- 1979 to 2022: The Descent
- Today: What It Left Behind
- About the Stagnation Assassin
1935: What the Manual Actually Standardised
Howard Johnson took over a Quincy soda fountain in 1925, bought an ice cream recipe with roughly double the usual butterfat, and built it out to twenty-eight flavours. His first restaurant opened in 1929. Then the crash removed his ability to borrow, and in 1935 he persuaded an acquaintance to open a second restaurant on Cape Cod using the acquaintance’s capital, buying all food and ice cream from Johnson and operating to Johnson’s standards. That is now recognised as the first modern restaurant franchise, and it was improvised out of capital scarcity rather than designed.
The artifact worth examining is what came next: the operating manual, which specified preparation, service and cleanliness in detail, backed by centralised supply of the ice cream and signature foods so that a franchisee could not substitute cheaper ingredients. Read the list of what it fixed. The recipes. The menu. The dish. The manual standardised the product itself, and the supply chain existed to make the product unalterable.
1955 to 1975: Which Layer Gets Hardened
Position Hardening is the discipline of making an existing advantage progressively harder to attack, and this case is the clearest illustration I know of its failure mode, which is hardening the wrong layer.
Howard Johnson’s hardened the product. Every year of enforcement made the twenty-eight flavours, the fried clams and the sit-down format more fixed, more supply-locked and more contractually embedded across hundreds of independent operators. The system worked. That is the problem: what it protected was a menu, and a protected menu is a menu you cannot change.
McDonald’s hardened the process. Throughput, station design, cost per unit, training and replicability, which are content-agnostic. You can push a breakfast menu, a drive-thru, an espresso line, a remodelled dining room or an ordering kiosk through a hardened process, and McDonald’s has pushed all of them. The standardisation did not resist the change; it delivered it to thousands of sites at once.
So the comparison settles what the single case cannot. Two franchise systems, both centrally controlled, both obsessive about standards, opposite outcomes. The variable is not how much you standardise. It is whether the thing you have made unalterable is what you sell or how you make it.
1979 to 2022: The Descent
Fast food undercut the sit-down format on price and speed, the 1970s oil crisis thinned the highway traffic the orange roofs were built beside, and enforcement of the standards themselves eventually slipped, so a chain once synonymous with reliability came to be described as tired and sometimes even dirty.
The family sold to Imperial Group in 1979 for $630 million. Marriott acquired it in the mid-1980s, wanted the real estate, and broke the restaurants off. The Times Square location closed in 2005. Lake Placid closed in early 2015 and Bangor in September 2016. The last one, in Lake George, did not open for Memorial Day weekend in 2022, having last operated that March. From roughly a thousand locations to none, across 97 years.
Today: What It Left Behind
The Inheritance Standard judges a decision by what it leaves rather than what it earns, and applied here it produces an unusual result. Howard Johnson’s left its shareholders nothing. It left the industry everything.
Centralised supply of the components that matter, a written operating standard, protected territories, and expansion funded by the operator’s capital rather than the brand owner’s: that structure is the one every chain built afterwards, including the one that replaced it. The name survives on Wyndham’s economy motels. The template survives in every franchise agreement signed since.
Which leaves a question I would rather pose than answer. Johnson hardened the layer that was genuinely his advantage in 1935, when the product really was the thing nobody else could match. The layer that mattered changed underneath him, and the machinery he had built to protect the old one was, by construction, the machinery least able to notice. The transferable discipline is not to harden less. It is to be specific about what you are hardening, and to know that the answer has a shelf life.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 product and transformation executive who has driven $3B+ in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he is VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he writes on standardisation, defensibility, and the difference between protecting how you operate and freezing what you sell. He turns proprietary frameworks including Position Hardening, the 3-S Method, and the HOT System into field-tested tools for executives, and is the author of the Stagnation Assassin series, a Forbes contributor, and an award-winning keynote speaker. Connect with Todd on LinkedIn or visit his speaking page.
Harden your process and you can change what goes through it. Harden your product and you have protected the one thing you will eventually need to abandon.
Todd speaks to executive teams and conferences on standardisation, defensibility, and choosing the layer worth protecting. Book a keynote.