- Burger King has almost 20,000 restaurants around the world: Between 2009 and 2021, it has doubled the number of locations.
- The Florida-based company’s global expansion has helped it rank among the world’s most valuable quick-service brands with a brand value of more than $6 billion (2021).
- Its design changes, in many cases based on retro images, have given it very good results.
The Burger King restaurant chain has a total of 19,247 restaurants open (until 2021) worldwide. The vast majority are franchisees (19,196, to be precise) and only 51 company-operated restaurants remain.
In 2009 there were more than 1,400 restaurants operated by the same firm, but the strategy over the years was to change towards a franchise model that, apparently, has given results since the number of points of sale has not stopped growing since then.
Precisely 2009 is a key year in this story: it was the year in which a shopping center closed in the city of Wilmington, in the state of Delaware (USA) and, with it, a Burger King restaurant that was “frozen in time.”
Last week, 13 years later, it was rediscovered by employees of an air conditioning company who were repairing the system.
That’s right, behind a wall that they had to knock down to find a flaw, they found an almost intact Burger King from the 80s, since when it closed in 2009 they had made practically no changes to its structure.
The photos were initially published on Reddit and then they went viral Twitter.
The Burger King of 80 was discovered while repairing the air conditioning system
The old BK is in a shopping center in that city called Concord Mall, which partially closed in 2009, “trapping” the restaurant for more than a decade.
“Although we cannot confirm the details, we verify that the design and decoration correspond to the Burger King that were operating in the 1980s and 1990s, there is no doubt that it is an old restaurant of the brand, “he published. Todaythe first medium that broke the news, when it was not yet confirmed if it was a BK.
A fully intact vintage Burger King was found behind a wall at the Concord Mall in Wilmington, DE. This photo was snapped by Jonathon Pruitt April 2022. pic.twitter.com/G3V3SnJM3J
— Jeze3D.exe v2.2.1 (@RealJezebelley) June 28, 2022
A few hours later, the news was updated with the testimony of Tom Dahlke, manager of the Concord Mall, who assured that the restaurant had opened for the first time in 1987 and that it closed in the 2009 crisis, after the problems derived from the outbreak of the mortgage bubble. “I’d like it to become a retro restaurant, I’m sure people would eat there,” Dahlke said.
The discovery was made by Jonathan Pruitt, an employee of the company that maintains the HVAC air system. He was the one who initially uploaded the photo to Reddit and it later went viral.
Pruitt says he hasn’t stopped receiving text messages and phone calls related to the photo, which already has more than 55,000 upvotes on the social network.
On Twitter, the photos added more than 24,000 RTs and 190,000 likes.
Lmao that was literally my storage room back in 2019 pic.twitter.com/c8RUILLZmK
— Lizard (@loserskwaddd) June 28, 2022
Clearly, the image has provoked feelings of nostalgia in viewers, a point that brands must know how to take advantage of when planning advertising campaigns.
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