LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Faced with outdated Pizza Hut shops and growing competition, the multi-national Yum Yum restaurant conglomerate plans to close 250 U.S locations by July. The company said the Pizza Hut locations will be identified soon in a shop-by-shop review. Yum Yum has 6,000 U. S. locations. The single Winona franchise is held out of LaCrosse. The owner has eliminated table service, which lost customers, and shifted to an order-at-the-counter business model. A spruce-up remodeling has failed to reverse course.
Pizza Hut profile
The company was founded in Wichita, Kansas, in 1955, and purchased by PepsiCo in 1977. PepsiCo nurtured the company into dominance in the United State as a sit-down and take-out pizza purveyor. Yum Yum acquired the brand in 1997 and folded it into a portfolio that included KFC, Taco Bell, and Habit Burger & Grill. Yum Yum has expanded the Pizza Hut brand profitably to 19,900 locations globally. In the United States, however, profitability has slipped. Sales dropped 5% last year. U.S. dominance has been yielded to rival Domino’s.