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| That would have probably taken forever and been mildly disappointing when you finally got it as well. |
Boston - If you grew up in Massachusetts, it’s where you went for an after-school Fribble or where your doting grandparents took you for lunch. The big red signs off the highways were a signal you were home, and the cramped booths at your neighborhood outpost were a familiar place to linger over a Conehead Sundae. So a lot of people are sharing memories today after the announcement by the Wilbraham-based Friendly Ice Cream Corp. that it was closing 63 of its nearly 500 locations as it looks to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Approximately 30 of the stores are in Massachusetts, including stores in Acton, Attleboro, Dedham, Leominster, Needham, Quincy, Stoughton, and Worcester.
Are you people kidding me? What is with the sentimentality towards Friendly's? Every time a useless, or past its time business or institution closes its doors legions of devoted followers come out of the woodwork to lament its closing or downfall, ignoring the fact that if they actually did love the business (in this case Friendly's) that much it woudln't be closing, business would be booming.
With Friendly's, what exactly are you people going to miss? My fondest memory of Friendly's is the same memory I have from every visit to the third rate eatery chain: Waiting upwards of 45 minutes for my burger and fries (in a fairly empty restaurant, because it's Friendly's) on my way back from the beach, and ice cream that is the same quality as the stuff I can buy in Stop n' Shop. There's nothing to miss here. It was a poorly run restaurant, poor service, and mediocre food, not exactly a recipe for success.
Sure if you had kids it was a decent place to go for a meal with them and hide out from civilized adults who don't want to hear your kids screaming or throwing ketchup laced fries all over the place, but that was about its only upside.
Even their frappes sucked. Sorry, but they sucked. I'll take a frappe from an actual ice cream stand any day of the week. I don't know if these things used to be good, or what, but the last few times I got one it was basically whipped milk and bubbles, just sucking air up a straw, not much ice cream to be found.
So sorry, Friendly's. It's never good to see a place go out of business, but I'm not exactly going to cry about a mediocre at best food chain that I only patronized out of starvation on my way back from the beach a handful of times. If your food, ice cream, or service were any good at all, things would have ended up differently.
