Would White Castle Succeed On Cape Cod?

 Is there room on Cape Cod for another fast food heavyweight? Would a White Castle succeed here, or is there some local mojo thing that would kill it before it grows? Sure, there is war in Europe and gas is $5 a gallon, but this is important. I took the liberty of photoshopping a White Castle into the Belmont Circle rotary in Bourne, but it could go anywhere on the Cape.

White Castle is a Kansas-based hamburger franchise chain that is most commonly associated with New York. You mostly find them in the Midwest, but you most likely have seen them in New York. There was one in Boston for a while, but the Great Depression killed it. It's a falafel place now.

Famous for their Slider mini-burgers, they are as good a bet as Hardee's or Carl Jr's to be #4 if you started listing prominent hamburger chains. However, the gap between WC and the Big 3 (McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's) is precipitous. White Castle has 377 locations. McDonald's has 36,000.

It's better if you don't really look at the food.

White Castle patented a burger design where they drill 5 holes in it to make it cook faster. They are slow to change. It took them a dozen years to latch onto that "Put a slice of cheese on the burger and call it a cheeseburger" trend, and they didn't think to try Drive-thru until 1980. To be fair to WC, they are the only big-name chair to figure out how to sell their burgers pre-packaged in a supermarket or a 7-11, a feat that mighty McDonald's has yet to do.

Their openly viewed kitchen (WC came out the same year that Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a searing look at the meat-packing industry, and people distrusted ground beef unless they could see you cooking it) was later copied and made familiar to Americans by McDonald's.

If I was thinking of it at the time, I would have aimed the camera a bit lower and got that kitchen into this shot down below. That's why you can read this for free, people.

You can zoom in on the menu, or just look at it here.

As the Beastie Boys told us, "White Castle fries only come in one size."

Cape Cod has some fast food, but not to the extent that the rest of the world does. Massachusetts in general has a reputation for being hard on national franchises. Tim Horton's, Hardee's, Krispy Kreme, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Little Caeser's, Subway, Sonic, Hooters, Sbarro, Long John Silver, Arby's, Pizza Hut, Popeye's... all have had either failure or great difficulty when trying to set up in New England. New Englanders are very parochial, and Papa John is no match for some local owned Greco-Italo House Of Pizza.

You can go about 100 yards off the Coggeshall Street exit in New Bedford to see a mass marketed Papa John's on a main drag that has been shuttered for lack of business... and then turn a corner and see a mad-ghetto but still-operative New Bedford Pizza Spot business thriving on a side street. To be fair, New Bedford Pizza Spot has better food.

Some towns on Cape Cod are zoned in a manner that discourages fast food franchises from coming. Provincetown drove away a Burger King in the 1980s by setting up bylaws regarding water usage, seating, sewage, drive thrus and food being processed on the premises. The rules are tolerable for a small place, but crushing for volume-style chains who have shareholders to enrich.

The plus side is that Americans eat a lot of fast food, and there are only 3 options in the burger field.  Chick-fil-A is the only national KFC alternative (outside of a few South Coast Popeye stores) around, and they have lines around the block. White Castle, especially the only one for 250 miles, could tap into that motif.

Cape Cod is a bit less Massachusetts than the rest of the state, mostly because we have a gang of Summer People who arrive annually. They won't have that Yankee parochial streak, and would not snob on a franchise chain. Many of the tourists are New Yorkers and Midwesterners, and are used to White Castle.

We got these pictures from a road trip we did that had a Yonkers detour. A big problem WC would have here is that their food is rubbish. I say this as a grown man who goes to McDonald's and Burger King at a rate that a teenager would admire. There is a definite Giant Step down in quality, a bad thing to say when comparing your business staple to a Whopper Junior.

At the end of the day, it would be a roll of the dice, a risky bet with 10% inflation and gas at $5 a gallon. You'd be competing with Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This risky bet would be laid upon the shoulders of people who have ignored Pizza Hut, Krispy Kreme, Subway and many other heavy hitters, and it would be done so on the logic of "Yeah, but those were pizzas, donuts and sandwiches... now we're talking BURGERS."

Would it succeed? You tell me, in the comments below...

Hell, throw one in the Kennedy Compound...