Dog N' Suds.....wow! Talk about the past coming back to remind someone!
In the mid 1960's, my Dad's company was a "sole supplier" to the Dog N' Suds chain, then headquartered in Champaign IL. What his company would do is source, purchase, warehouse, inventory and then distribute everything except fresh buns and produce to all of the Dog N' Suds stores nationally. Their root beer wasn't just good, it was outright fantastic and their char-burgers and chili dogs were obvious superior products as well... they were well ahead of their time quality-wise for sure! (By the way, among the other companies he did this for was McDonald's and his company will generate billions in sales to them this year alone, growing every year since the 1st franchise McD in Des Plaines IL!)
Fast Forward...... to 1989..... as a favor to an old friend, I had put his handicapped-operator focused hot dog chain, Heavenly Hot Dogs, into a shell so that they could get some financial traction in the marketplace. It worked too, in that the infusion of capital from penny stock sales allowed them to develop vans that could be operated by handicapped franchisees with preferential placement in locations like post offices, court houses and federal parks, etc. They had just gotten rolling when the president told me that one of our childhood favorite chains, Dog N' Suds was on the market for, as I recall, around $60,000 in stock and that this would be an even more in depth penetration of the national market. Those good business reasons of course weren't really #1 (to us, anyway)...the important ones, but what WAS important were the two new but overlooked machines that we got along with the deal. (Look, we knew it was a good business decision, but how many people do YOU know with their own Dog N' Suds root beer machines, which only cost us just over $2,400 from the inventory ...??)
We bought Dog N' Suds from a MI Company named DeNovo (good businessmen, very nice people, the owner was a car collector too, by the way), but had to sell it back to them in all fairness to the franchisees when we were approached by a large international handicapped van builder that wanted our technology assets (that was the technology purchased through stock sales that actually stayed the valuable intellectual property of the original funding Company, interesting concept, huh, Peter!!!!).
I still have my Dog N/ Suds machine in my card / game room and it still makes a wonderful chilled mug of delicious root beer, which I still buy 12 gallons of concentrate of every year!
Of Note, Heavenly Hot Dogs conveyed a $.09 dividend (nine cents a share) when the technology was purchased and more when the shell was sold. No single shareholder ever paid more than $.025 (two and a half cents) for their shares so because these shareholders were dealt with on a simple honest basis, they were still rewarded and not given the royal shaft as Peter has obviously deemed appropriate in the disgusting and deplorably unethical way in which I believe he has treated his shareholders.
Besides in Peter's lying (in my opinion)and seemingly never ending fiasco, nobody got delicious Dog N' Suds root beer at all...............!!!!
