Success at 4

To many, the lowly cafeteria is a symbol of soup-line shabbiness. So what happens when it is spruced up with classy decor, white-jacketed waiters and tasty food? In the case of Mobile-based Morrison Incorporated, the resulting high costs hold profits to a thinly sliced 40-c- a meal. Naturally, the company has to compensate for that with volume. One of the nation's fastest-growing cafeteria chains, with 57 branches in seven Southeastern states (and six more due to open this year), Morrison's serves up 2,000,000 meals a month, has tripled annual sales over the past dozen years to $47,284,000.

To explain Morrison's success, President J. Herbert Gibbons, 53, characterizes it as "a cafeteria that thinks like a restaurant." He might have described it as a cafeteria that thinks like a conglomerate. Over the years, Morrison's has branched into fields ranging from coffeemaking to insurance, with the result that noncafeteria operations accounted for 27% of last year's profits of $1,885,-000. This week, in a $7,600,000 stock-swap deal, the company takes over Memphis-based Admiral Benbow Inn, Inc., which operates a chain of 15 restaurants and ten motels.

See the Boss. Such expansion has characterized Morrison's ever since it opened its first cafeteria in a Mobile relief hall in 1920. Named after Co-Founder J. Arthur Morrison, an Alabama restaurateur who had seen a cafeteria in Denver and brought the idea South, the business caught on so fast that three more branches were opened within a year. Anxious to avoid the dreariness that afflicted so many other cafeterias, Morrison's employed waiters to carry the customer's tray to his table, also set most of its serving lines out of sight of the dining areas. The idea, then as now, was that cafeteria dining can be respectable, a notion advanced by the company's current advertising claim that "you might see even your boss at Morrison's."

Though no two Morrison's cafeterias are decorated alike--motifs can vary from French colonial to classical Roman--menus, portions and prices are the same from branch to branch. Shunning more exotic dishes, the chain sticks to such bestselling staples as roast beef, chicken and fried shrimp, specifications for which are detailed in a six-inch-thick recipe book called "the Bible." With an IBM computer keeping close tabs on supplies and customer preferences, Morrison's holds losses from spoilage and leftovers to a scant 2%. Similar precision governs food display: on the serving line, such higher-profit extras as shrimp cocktail and strawberry shortcake always come first, on the theory that hungry customers are most apt to buy them before they get their meat and potatoes.

Besides assuring uniform food quality, Morrison's emphasis on standardization helps to keep costs under rigid control. To further hold down expenses, it relies heavily on the services of its wholly-owned subsidiaries. The Morrison Merchandising Corporations handle the food buying, storage and processing for all Morrison's cafeterias. The company's properties are insured by Morrison Assurance Co., which also sells fire and casualty policies to the public. In addition, Morrison's has its own restaurant equipment, detergent-making and coffee-processing companies. And the fastest-growing subsidiary of all is Morrison Food Services, which operates snack bars, vending machines and cafeterias in factories as well as in schools and hospitals.

To the Suburbs. One challenge that Morrison's faces is the proliferation of other quick-service eating places. "Every hamburger stand, hot-dog stand and fried-chicken place is competition for us," says President Gibbons. To keep pace, the company is turning away from downtown areas by locating its new cafeterias in the suburbs, and it is also moving for the first time into take-out food services. In broadening its operations, it has particularly high hopes for its newly acquired Admiral Benbow chain. Calculating that some 60% of its cafeteria customers are traveling people, Morrison's is confident that a good share of them will soon be checking into Admiral Benbow motels.

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