RIP Franchises of our youths

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Marie Callender's in San Jose closes, only one restaurant remains in SF Bay Area

  NEWS  

There's soon going to be only one place in the San Francisco Bay Area to pick up a Marie Callender's tangy lemon meringue pie.
The San Jose location of the restaurant and bakery chain known for its pies is closing its doors on Monday, and only a Sunnyvale location will remain.
The franchise owner told the San Jose Mercury News that he could no longer afford the rent. The kitchen is already closed, but pies (from coconut cream to apple) will be for sale at the bakery through today. 
The late Marie Callender started baking pies at home in Long Beach, Calif., in the 1940s after "answering a delicatessen's help-wanted ad," the New York Times said in her 1995 obituary. The deli owner urged her to start a baking business and she went on to sell her pies to restaurants in Orange County. Marie's son, Don, opened the first restaurant in 1964 in Orange, and the family went on to open several more before selling to Ramada Inn in 1986, "when it had annual sales of $175 million," the Times said. Ramada sold the company to Wilshire Restaurant Group in 1989, the LA Times reported, and the chain struggled financially.
The restaurants still use many of Marie's original recipes, the company website said.
The company that now owns the Marie Callender's restaurant chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019. At the time, 19 locations in the U.S. were shuttered.