Americans love to eat out. The National Restaurant Association says we spent close to six hundred million dollars on eating and drinking places and that’s just for the first half of the year. In many small southern towns, fast food restaurants are the place to bring the family for a burger and shake. That includes Citronelle here in Alabama, Tunica in Mississippi, and Tallapoosa in Georgia. They’re all home to less than four thousand people and they all have a fast food chain called Jack’s Family Restaurants. APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge revisits this story she first brought to the national audience of Marketplace, how for this Alabama-based quick service restaurant, rural towns are the secret sauce.
“Will this be for here or to go hon? It’ll be for here. All right,” asks the cashier at a Jack’s Family Restaurant.
Roy Hollie’s favorite sandwich at Jack’s is the Big Bacon. Today he’s in Citronelle, Alabama. Hollie is an exterminator for a pest control company and there are seven Jack’s in his rural territory. He eats here a lot.
Probably once, twice a week, depending on where I’m working. What area I’m in,” says Hollie.
Robert Jarvis grew up in Citronelle. He’s sampled plenty of the local burger spots like McDonalds and Hardees. But he’s a Jack’s regular. Earlier in the day Jarvis had the breakfast special. Now he’s back for lunch.
“There ain't much here. So you gotta eat where you can,” he observed.
Jack’s isn’t new to Alabama. The company started in 1960 in Homewood- near Birmingham. Today there are more than two hundred and fifty Jacks restaurants, owned bya private equity firm - though its jingle is less Madison Avenue and more of a nod to its southern roots. If you’ve heard it before, sing along.
Jack’s does open new restaurants in big cities like Memphis and Huntsville. But close to half of its restaurants are in small towns… populations of seven thousand or less. And that kind of rural footprint is unusual for quick service restaurants. Scott Taylor is a food and beverage researcher with the University of South Carolina School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.
“Typically you want to be in fairly highly populated areas, right? Because that's where saturation is. It's where growth potential is,” said Taylor.
But he concedes that the people at Jack’s may have hit on something.
“I think it's smart in the sense of all right, there's lack of competition. There's there's really no saturation. So hey, we can go be the service provider in this area,” he said.
And small towns, with limited dining options, are eager to have a restaurant that opens early and closes late seven days a week.
“The beauty is somebody could come for breakfast and get a plate with you know, eggs, bacon, a biscuit, and hash browns and then come back at dinner and say they want chicken,” said Todd Bartmess. He’s the CEO at Jack’s Family Restaurants. The company opens about twenty new restaurants a year but you’ll only find Jack’s in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia. Bartmess says there’s plenty of room to grow in rural communities there. “Our development strategy is we sort of just go to the next town out.”
Each restaurant brings about forty new jobs to town. That’s a relief for people like Ashley Tillman who got divorced and needed work. She comes in at four each morning to make biscuits.
“They took me in and they welcomed me with open arms,” she said.
As important as jobs, Jack’s brings sales tax revenue for the community. Jason Stringer is Citronelle’s mayor.
“They were they were expecting to do 1.7 million a year in sales,” he said.
To land the new business, Stringer says the city council agreed to give Jack’s a sales tax abatement to offset the cost of locating there. It’s a strategy Jack’s uses with many other rural towns like Atmore, Alabama and Yazoo City Mississippi. Stringer says it’s worth it.
“Every bit counts,” said Mayor Stringer.
Which means when it’s added to income from other retail businesses like Dollar General and CVS, taxes collected from Jack’s help Citronelle buy necessary equipment.
“We purchased a complete new fleet of police vehicles all at one time,” the Mayor said.
There’s one more major ingredient in the Jack’s rural expansion recipe. Truck parking. Mike Holley, no relation to Roy from earlier, is the third trucker in 20 minutes to pull up a big rig at the Jack’s in Citronelle. He’s hauling cardboard boxes to chicken plants in Mississippi. Holley comes to Jack’s mostly for the parking but
“They’ve got good food, good shakes, good ice cream,” he said.
And those good shakes add up to a lot of business. Jack’s CEO says the company is on track to earn more than half a billion dollars in 2024.
