From the ’70s through ’90s, hundreds of Ground Round restaurants dotted America. The family-friendly restaurants had cartoons projected on the walls and staff doling out free peanuts, with customers tossing the shells right on the floor.1 It was all as classy as it sounds.
Ground Round also had a rather incredible “Kids Pay What They Weigh” promotion. Here’s a contemporaneous ad:
Did any kids actually do the paying?
[Image credit: Newspapers.com]
The dollar was worth more in 1987, but that 62¢ meal would still come in at under $2 today. That’s pretty cheap, at least until you factor in the cost of the therapy that will later be required.
The chain’s numbers dwindled over the years, down to just four Midwest locations earlier this year. However, that number has just grown by one. A new Ground Round location recently opened in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, west of Boston.
If it’s surprising to see the opening of a new Ground Round, even more shocking is what’s inside. The peanuts are gone, but the Penny-A-Pound scale has returned:
The Ground Round Hound wants to know if you weigh what you “should”.
[Photo credit: The Ground Round]
Given inflation, the economics of this are even worse for the restaurant than before, but I would think the cost of bad publicity has the potential to be the real killer.
Footnotes:
The chain eventually switched to handing out popcorn rather than peanuts, due to concerns about both “allergies and fire-code violations”. I love the idea that the floor of a Ground Round might have been so covered in flammable legume husks that the fire marshal had to shut them down. ↩︎
