The restaurant news headline reads “300 Pizza Huts are Closing,” the articles came to me from a friend in the middle of the night, and I was up working, knowing what I would find before I opened the pieces. Pizza Hut closing 300 or so stores intersects directly with an area of study that concerns me more than most things, how the destruction of social capital and the decline of a strong, white working-class manifests itself in our daily lives. The reports confirmed a trend I've been watching play out in the real world over the past several years. The Pizza Hut locations that are closing as part of the bankruptcy of a restaurant holdings company are nearly all dine-in locations.[1] A special sub-set of pizza restaurants.
The old Pizza Hut dine-in locations were places even a low-income family could have a pleasant experience together. Good pizza came to your table on a hot iron skillet. There were arcade games to play, a jukebox to play your favorite music, solariums were even en vogue during one epoch of the company’s history.
Nothing seems to be designed with the family in mind anymore. Everything is trending towards serving an atomized and lonely population. One devoid of a past, without much hope or vision for the future.
Back to the old Pizza Huts – those majestic tiffany style lamps, brick interior walls, coffered ceilings made of wooden beams, nice curtains adorning the windows, the build quality that went into a chain pizza place was tremendous! Quality and detail - the relics of a bygone era. Old Pizza Hut Interior.
Eventually, the Tiffany-style lamps would be replaced with standard lighting you can find at any big box home improvement store. Brick walls are expensive; curtains are difficult to keep clean in a restaurant. I'm sure many of the custom lamps were broken over the years. The shift towards carry-out only stores progressed.
Articles discussing the closure of the dine-in stores mentioned a trend towards ordering online, delivery services, and of course, Covid-19 shutdowns and fallout. These explanations are acceptable if you want to discuss the terminal events or later contributory issues. Yet I find they are somewhat incomplete if you are trying to understand why a population went from enjoying sitting in a solarium in the winter, watching the snow quietly fall above you, warm and safe inside with your favorite Eddie Money song on the radio, kids playing a couple of arcade games safely nearby, to suddenly not. What kind of society gives that up in favor of eating at home alone with Netflix? Who would choose to have their pizza delivered late, cold, likely incorrect, by a foreigner you summoned from an app on your phone, instead of being offered on an iron skillet by a cute waitress that speaks the same language to your plush booth and checkered table cloth?[2]
While the bankruptcy almost exclusively affects the dine-in locations, the better performing carry-out locations will be sold or otherwise remain operational.[3]
Some of the old dine-in buildings will be torn down and the land redeveloped, some will be repurposed, like much of our history, they will exist only in our memories. I’ll still drive by where they used to stand and remember being a kid with a Book IT! ticket for a free pizza and my dad taking me for dinner.[4] I'll remember the local Pizza Hut being one of the first places I drove after getting my license, and being the lunch spot during a frigid November when I was working in construction, replacing a roof right before Thanksgiving.
Pizza Hut closing hundreds of their dine-in locations leaves another barren space in what used to be part of our public life. The corner stores are violent, malls have the veneer of normalcy but scratch the surface and you often find the demographics and behavior of a third-world bazaar. One less Friday night spot friendly to our kind. One less place to spend time with friends, one less place to go on a date. One less place for a nice white family without much money to have a lovely experience together.
Going to Pizza Hut after little league games (this used to be a popular commercial and selling point in the 1990s) and to birthday parties is a shared memory many of us have. With the decline of social capital exacerbated by increased racial diversity, the need for a traditional dining room also fades.
Pizza Hut is closing hundreds of their dining-room locations not because pizza generally or their product is not popular. Sales are still strong for the industry and the company as a whole. They are closing because the people who would once frequent their dine-in stores are now lonely, friendless, childless, without families. In short, they've nobody to sit around with and eat pizza. And those are of the demographic who remains, dine-in Pizza Huts tended to be in classic middle-American neighborhoods. Lower-middle or middle-class, white, with kids. And those places are becoming rarer with each passing year.
Restaurants were once built around the idea of family dine-in. They sought to achieve a warm, friendly, and affordable experience. Family dining establishments were once a strand in the healthy social fabric of society. Perhaps even a crucial strand. Just as we can look to the condition of your local corner store or mall to gauge the direction of the neighborhood, we can look to the foodservice industry at a macro-level to see broad trends in society. Thirty years ago, we saw the solarium and lunch buffet, kids eat free nights and inviting interior spaces. Today, sterile and cold dining rooms, a focus on carry-out and delivery, are a reaction to the decline of the nuclear family in America. As the traditional family declines, the need for third spaces in American life that cater to the family also declines. And as third-spaces decline, the ability to socialize, make friends, meet new people, in turn, declines. A graveyard spiral begins to develop. Sometimes I wonder if all I’m doing here is pulling back the yoke in a panic, accelerating the fated crash.
For some years now, I have been looking for one of those tiffany-style Pizza Hut lamps. Never wanting to order from eBay due to excessive prices and the common feature I read about many times of the lamps arriving in far more than one piece, I hunted high and low offline. A person on Twitter who had been following my "Pizza Hut posting" for years sent me a message with a link to a Facebook post by a man claiming to have one of the relics for sale. I messaged him; he was about 500 miles away. A friend of mine and myself made a quick road trip out of it. Arriving mid-afternoon in an older apartment complex on the outskirts of a large city, we would find a man waiting with a nearly pristine example of what I would learn was the remnants of the Pizza Hut he managed for the better part of a decade. A light gossamer was covering the inside, showing its age and provenance. The former manager estimated it to be around 40 years old. It was a dine-in location, of course, which closed, and the building bulldozed. Shortly before the very last pizza was served, he and the staff each took a lamp as a souvenir. Because of Covid lockdowns, he could not find work and was selling the lamp to cover some bills. When he asked me what my "offer" was for the lamp, I handed him what he had asked for initially and carefully loaded the lamp into a box filled with packing peanuts. I’m not sure I’ve ever driven that carefully in my entire life as I did on the way back home with what I consider to be a piece of not only my personal history but all of ours. It is not unreasonable to consider the possibility that in the near future, there will be people living in the cities we grew up in and lived, and will have never experienced something like a dine-in Pizza Hut on a Friday night.
Sure, maybe waxing poetic about a fast-food chain is lame to some out there. Maybe you "had to be there" to get it. Say what you want; I was there, in the solarium as it snowed, eating a buttery piece of crust with a red tumbler filled with Pepsi. And if you weren't, and you couldn’t possibly understand.
In any event, if you walked into my kitchen and saw the old Pizza Hut lamp hanging above the table, I bet you’d want to know the story.
In the end, my message is that once upon a time, in our society, even something as boorish as the chain pizza store, things were beautiful and elegant. Spaces were once designed with the family in mind. I might even go as far as to say a nice, white family in mind. From the inviting solarium to the cool gray box with cheap adornments as an afterthought, it's hard not to think we live in the husk of what used to be. It is not my belief that there will be some total collapse of civilization, casting us back into the stone age. Some cataclysmic or watershed event might happen, sure, yet I am more of the belief that we already live in the ruins of an era that was far more grand.
There is something deeply disquieting about outliving so many of your old haunts. You start to lost track of where one life ended and the next began. You begin to wonder if you are the haunted or you are the specter.
Maybe there is a white family in a Pizza Hut in some other world, some other time, dropping quarters in the jukebox and into the arcade, enjoying a hot hand-tossed pizza they can easily afford. Maybe there will be again. Until then, I will be under the dim glow of a Pizza Hut lamp, forcing a smile because it was all so real, if only for a fleeting season in my life.
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