New Bill of Fare

As purveyors of inexpensive food, the Childs Co. has had as many ups & downs as its flapjacks. On the other hand, New York's Louis Sherry, Inc., makers of high-quality candy and ice cream, has had an income as substantial as most of its customers. Last week) 61-year-old Childs decided to upgrade its food and its balance sheet. For "more than $2,000,000" it bought upwards of 90% of the stock in Sherry's from Mrs. Lucius M. Boomer, widow of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel's longtime board chairman. (Boomer founded the confectionery company with the late Louis Sherry after Sherry's fashionable Fifth Avenue restaurant closed down during Prohibition.)

The deal was the latest accomplishment of a management team that bought control of Childs's 53 restaurants two months ago for about $1,500,000. The team: crisp, ruddy-faced President N. Clark Earl Jr., onetime top aide to Restaurant Man Howard Johnson and formerly a colonel in charge of Army PXs and commissaries in Europe, and Executive Vice President Charles Crouch, 51, who had built up six faltering grocery stores into California's successful Lucky Stores chain (TIME, June 30, 1947). Although Childs had lost almost $230,000 in 1949 on a gross of nearly $20 million, the new team thought that Childs could be a moneymaker if the right bill of fare was found.

No Plumbers. They cut $293,000 in annual costs by centralizing the restaurants' purchasing system and dropping the maintenance department. (Says Crouch: "We're restaurant men, not plumbers.") To boost the low morale of their 5,000 employees, they made each manager directly responsible for his restaurant, handed each a 20% raise and the promise of a profit-sharing plan if & when there are profits to be shared. They hired an ex-Powers model to teach Childs waitresses how to look better, centralized the baking job in New York and cut the bakers from 72 to five.

To make Childs's food more appetizing, they brought in experts in coffee-making, began buying top-grade butter & eggs, fresher vegetables, etc. To lure more people into Childs, they are planning to spend $1,500,000 on renovation. The team hopes to revive the "Meet me at Childs" saying of the '20s by installing pancake griddles in the windows again--and hiring pretty Jills to flip the jacks.

No Loss. As Sherry's new president (in a friendly switch of titles, Earl is executive vice president), Crouch plans to give franchises to stores and restaurants throughout the country to sell Sherry products; he already has 150 such requests.

Childs may still have a way to go before it buys back its old reputation for good food at low prices. But this week the new management issued its first progress report. It announced that Childs had been losing money at the rate of $1,300,000 a year only two months ago. In April, thanks to the drastic cost-cutting, Childs netted a tasty $16,000, even though sales volume was down.

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