Henry's Hamburgers
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Henry's Hamburgers is a former American fast-food restaurant chain of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Only one franchise store, in Michigan, remains.


History

In 1954 the Bresler's Ice Cream Company decided to expand into the growing fast-food drive-in industry. Company executives were looking for a new outlet to promote higher sales of their malts and shakes without altering their existing ice cream shop franchises. Under the name Henry's Hamburgers, many franchises were eventually established. The name Henry was chosen to honor the memory of the late Henry Bresler, one of the brothers who had founded the ice cream company. Henry's was modelled after James Collin's Hamburger Handout restaurants in Southern California which in turn had been modelled after the McDonald brother's San Bernardino operation. They were both a Chicago area competitor and copy of McDonald's.''Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age'' by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle


Growth

By 1956, Henry's Hamburgers had thirty-five locations in the
Chicago area The Chicago metropolitan area, also colloquially referred to as Chicagoland, is a metropolitan area in the Midwestern United States. Encompassing 10,286 sq mi (28,120 km2), the metropolitan area includes the city of Chicago, its suburbs and hin ...
. At the time that outnumbered some of the industry's current giants, such as
McDonald's McDonald's Corporation is an American multinational fast food chain, founded in 1940 as a restaurant operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald, in San Bernardino, California, United States. They rechristened their business as a hambur ...
. By the early 1960s there were over two hundred Henry's restaurants across America with operations headquarters in
Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...
. Henry's used the advertising slogans "Aren't you hungry for a Henry's?" and "Head for Henry's", and offered burgers for as low as 15 cents or "ten burgers for a buck".


Decline

By the mid-1970s Henry's Hamburger locations began closing while repeated mergers and ownership changes took place within the Bresler company. The only remaining location is in
Benton Harbor, Michigan Benton Harbor is a city in Berrien County in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is 46 miles southwest of Kalamazoo and 71 miles southwest of Grand Rapids. According to the 2020 census, its population was 9,103. It is the smaller, by population, ...
.


See also

*
List of defunct fast-food restaurant chains This is a list of defunct fast-food chains. A restaurant chain is a set of related restaurants with the same name in many different locations that are either under shared corporate ownership (e.g., McDonald's in the U.S.) or franchising agreemen ...
*
List of hamburger restaurants This is a list of notable hamburger restaurants. A hamburger is a sandwich consisting of one or more cooked patties of ground meat (usually beef) usually placed inside a sliced hamburger bun. Hamburgers are often served with lettuce, bacon, tom ...


References


External links


Henry's TV Commercial
{{Restaurants in Chicago Defunct restaurant chains in the United States Fast-food franchises Fast-food chains of the United States Defunct fast-food chains in the United States 1954 establishments in Illinois Restaurants established in 1954 Restaurants in Chicago Benton Harbor, Michigan Restaurants in Michigan