The demise of Doggie Diner signals the end of an era

Nation's Restaurant News, June 2, 1986 by Alan Liddle

SAN FRANCISCO -- The last two Doggie Dinners died and were buried the other day, but their master for more than 30 years, Al Ross, did not attend the funeral.

"It's like a good friend," Ross said of the chain--one of Northern California's pioneer fast-food concepts--that he founded in Oakland in 1948. "I want to remember him alive."

Ross was explaining why he did not travel from his home in Palm Springs to San Francisco or nearby Alameda on April 30, the day the last two diners ceased doing business under the Doggie banner. Those units, like some others that have fallen out of the chain in recent years, will continue operating under other ownership and other names.

But gone is the Doggie Diner feel--not a small part of it carted off with the 12-foot plastic dachshund heads removed from the roofs of the closing units. In its heyday, the chain consisted of 26 units and stretched from all the way from San Jose to San Francisco.

Purchased by Ogden Allied Services in 1969, the company was slowly dismantled. It reportedly lost money during its last two years.

In some cases Ogden chose not to renew leases because the units were in deteriorating neighborhoods. In others real-estate prices made it impossible to turn down purchase offers. The last two units were at 10th and Mission in San Francisco and at Pacific Avenue and Webster Street in alameda.

While some might say it was the impersonal touch of a large corporation that spelled the demise of the Doggies, others would blame it on the rise of modern fast-food giants, such as McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's.

With union help--the cooks were making $6.21 an hour under the last contract and were expected to rise above $8 if a new one had been signed--the diner chain could not stay competitive pricewise, with the nationals using nonunion help. Even the staunchest of Doggie fans--including ross and his right-hand man and partner, Andrew A. Knudsen--agree this was one of the biggest contributors to the chain's woes.

And old age itself played a part in the extinction of Canine Fast Foodus, as the company might have been known in Latin. Many of the units were in need of remodeling but generated little or no profit to offset those costs.

the early diners had prefabricated metal shells and offered counter service only, though patio seating was developed later. They were 25 feet square and served hotdogs, chili dogs, hamburgers and variations of those. On a good day one of the diners might see between 700 and 1,200 customers.

"I couldn't boil an egg," Ross, 69, said of his culinary skills when the first diner opened. But he avoided problems by "surrounding myself with people who were good at what they did," he recalled.

One of the first on board was Knudsen, a graduate of Michigan State University's school of hotel and restaurant administration. He handled operations while Ross promoted the concept and looked for site.

"We aimed for three things: quality product, cleanliness and good personnel," said Knudsen, who retired to California's wine country in 1978.

Ross and Knudsen wanted pedigrees only.

"If a unit wasn't profitable in a year," Knudsen said, "we'd sublet it and take the name off."

Ross said the company grew because people believed in it.

"We had the same purveyors fro 25 years," he said. "We had the same customers."

Nothing was ever sold to a customer that "wasn't good enough for my family," Ross said.

Another important tenet, he said, was that "I never ask an employee to do something I wouldn't do myself." Even after the company began to prosper, "it wasn't past me to walk into a diner, put on an apron and the tell the guy [behind the counter] to get the hell out," Ross said of his hands-on management style.

Though they parted professional company in 1978, Ross had only good things to say about Knudsen and the 30 years the two spent jointly walking the Doggies.

"We had one [major] dispute, and that was resolved in 10 minutes," he said.

When the two sold the 26-unit company for stock, it was doing about $6 million in annual sales. Ross remained as president and later as a consultant under contracts lasting another 12 years but came to rue the day he ever sold the company.

According to Ross, his agreement with Odgen included an understanding that the company would provide expansion money, enough to add four of five new pups a year. However, he claimed, funding for large-scale expansion never materialized.

"You know about big corporations," he said, "they immediately set about to discourage the entrepreneur and bring in the pencil pushers."

Ross said he believes Ogden "really intended to grow" the Doggie Diner chain but was doomed from the start because "all they [Ogden officials) cared about were profits."