Category: The Washington Free Beacon
Pizza Hut Classic: Retro fun ruined by non-English-speaking staff, indifferent customer service
Pizza Hut Classic is evidence that even if a company gets its branding right, customer service is the oil that keeps the machine running.
Since 2019, Pizza Hut has been spreading its retro vibes across the continent by reintroducing its 1990s decor, design, and dining experience.
‘The interior features cozy red booths and old-school Pizza Hut lamps.’
From Warren, Ohio to Hempstead, Texas, the iconic Pizza Hut chandeliers are being rehung, and the fantastic buffet is being put out once again. According to Chefs Resource, some locations have even brought back the beloved dessert bar.
Slice of life
With the return of the 1974 logo and nostalgic appeal, Pizza Hut did the inverse of Cracker Barrel. Instead of trying to modernize and simplify their decor, the pie-slingers retrofitted and cluttered theirs.
A page called the Retrologist dissected the formula and determined exactly what the word “Classic” in Pizza Hut Classic really means. To meet the new (old) standard, the writer pinpointed that each location must include the following:
1. The old logo is used in pole signage as well as at the top of the (usually but not always) red-roofed restaurant. The pole sign features the addition of the word “Classic.”
2. The interior features cozy red booths and old-school Pizza Hut lamps.
3. Stickers featuring the long-discarded character Pizza Hut Pete are found on the door.
4. Posters feature classic photos from Pizza Huts of yore.
5. A plaque displays a quote from Pizza Hut co-founder Dan Carney, explaining the concept as a celebration of the brand’s heritage.
While many of the revamped locations have received rave reviews, there still exists a way to make such a fine dining experience awful, even if surrounded by everything that made customers flock to the buffet 30 years ago.
RELATED: The ‘rebranding’ brigade’s war on beauty
Photo by Andrew Chapados/Blaze News
Word salad
For a Pizza Hut Classic ruined by modern belief systems, look no farther than north of the border, in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.
While the restaurant did include the iconic chandeliers and some of the retro furnishings, it did not have old soda fountains or the memorable menus spotted at other locations. Instead, this unique eatery represented a new (low) standard of lackluster customer service, coupled with sprinklings of unfettered immigration policy.
These accommodations, or lack there of, will surely split customers down political lines. Yes, there are retro red Pepsi cups, but the waitress who literally speaks no English may fill that cup with Diet Pepsi with ice instead of “water with no ice.”
Is there a salad bar? Yes. Is the salad bar limited to plain lettuce and croutons? Also yes. Were there pieces of lettuce dropped in the ranch dressing (the only available dressing) for the duration of the visit? Definitely.
RELATED: Cracker Barrel’s logo lives — but like every digital-age public space, it now looks dead inside
Photo by Andrew Chapados/Blaze News
Meat and greet
A steady rotation of cheese, deluxe, and Hawaiian pizza was only broken up by one couple’s complaints about the lack of variety. A manager — also largely unintelligible in her speech — replied first with a refusal to change the rotation. Strangely, about 10 minutes later, she eventually brought out two meat lovers’ pizzas, in an apparent act of defiance.
The damaged seating in the restaurant combined with a chip out of the “Hut” portion of the building’s exterior revealed years-old paint and, along with it, a yearning for more care to be given. A restaurant that could be so nostalgic, but ruined by the apparent comforts of a district that has voted Liberal in its last three federal elections for a woman from the U.K. who holds citizenship in three countries, including Pakistan.
“I wanted to go to a dine-in, because in most places, including the U.K., you can’t do that now,” said reporter Lewis Brackpool, who visited the location. He added, “I come to one, and what do you know — it sucks.”
In at a massive discount due to the exchange rate, Brackpool could not help but feel like many who are from the area: that what had been promised was robbed.
The experience can be summed up in the words of an anonymous would-be customer who, upon seeing a commercial of what a Pizza Hut buffet looked like in the 1990s in comparison to the location in question, said, “They took this from us.”
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Jimmy Lai’s Criminal Conviction Is What Democracy Dying In Darkness Actually Looks Like
Jimmy Lai’s courage is something America’s propaganda media could only dream of possessing.
Trump v. Slaughter exposes who really fears democracy
In the recently argued Trump v. Slaughter case, most of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to affirm what should be obvious: The president has a constitutional right under Article II to dismiss federal employees in the executive branch when it suits him.
That conclusion strikes many of us as self-evident. Executive-branch employees work under the president, who alone among them is chosen in a nationwide election. Bureaucrats are not. Why, then, should the chief executive’s subordinates be insulated from his control?
When the Roberts Court overturned Roe in 2022 and returned the issue to the states, many voters responded with fury. The electorate did not welcome responsibility. It resented it.
A vocal minority on the court appears to reject that premise. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor warned that allowing a president — implicitly a Republican one — to control executive personnel would unleash political chaos. Jackson suggested Trump “would be free to fire all the scientists, the doctors, the economists, and PhDs” working for the federal government. Sotomayor went further, claiming the administration was “asking to destroy the structure of government.”
David Harsanyi, in a perceptive commentary, identified what animates this view: “fourth-branch blues.” The administrative state now exercises power that rivals or exceeds that of the constitutional branches. As Harsanyi noted, nothing in the founders’ design envisioned “a sprawling autonomous administrative state empowered to create its own rules, investigate citizens, adjudicate guilt, impose fines, and destroy lives.”
Yet defenders of this system frame presidential oversight as a threat to “democracy.” Democrats, who present themselves as democracy’s guardians, warn that allowing agency officials to answer to the elected president places the nation in peril. The argument recalls their reaction to the Dobbs case, when the court returned abortion policy to voters and was accused of “undermining democracy” by doing so.
RELATED: This Supreme Court case could reverse a century of bureaucratic overreach
Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
On that point, Harsanyi and I agree. Judicial and bureaucratic overreach distort constitutional government. The harder question is whether voters object.
From what I can tell, most do not. Many Americans seem content to trade constitutional self-government for managerial rule, provided the system delivers benefits and protects their expressive preferences. The populist right may bristle at this arrangement, but a leftist administrative state that claims to speak for “the people” may reflect the electorate’s will.
Recent elections reinforce that suspicion. Voters showed little interest in reclaiming authority from courts or bureaucracies. They appeared far more interested in government largesse and symbolic rights than in the burdens of republican self-rule.
Consider abortion. Roe v. Wade rested on shaky legal ground, yet large segments of the public enthusiastically embraced it for nearly 50 years. When the Roberts Court overturned Roe in 2022 and returned the issue to the states, many voters responded with fury. States enacted expansive abortion laws, and Democrats benefited from unusually high turnout. The electorate did not welcome responsibility. It resented it.
This reaction should not surprise anyone familiar with history. In 1811, Spaniards rejected the liberal constitution imposed by French occupiers, crying “abajo el liberalismo” — down with liberalism. They did not want abstract rights. They wanted familiar authority.
At least half of today’s American electorate appears similarly disposed. Many prefer guided democracy administered by judges and managers to the uncertainties of self-government. Their votes signal approval for continued rule by the administrative state. Republicans may slow this process at the margins, but Democrats expand it openly, and voters just empowered them to do so.
RELATED: Stop letting courts and consultants shrink Trump’s signature promise
Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images
I anticipated this outcome decades ago. In “After Liberalism” (1999), I argued that democracy as a universal ideal tends to produce expanded managerial control with popular consent. Nineteenth-century fears that mass suffrage would yield chaos proved unfounded. Instead the extension of the franchise coincided with more centralized, remote, and less accountable government.
As populations lost shared traditions and common authority, governance shifted away from democratic participation and toward expert administration. The state grew less personal, less local, and less answerable, even as it claimed to act in the people’s name.
Equally significant has been the administrative state’s success in presenting itself as the custodian of an invented “science of government.” According to this view, administrators form an enlightened elite, morally and intellectually superior to the unwashed masses. Justice Jackson’s warnings reflect this assumption.
I would like to believe, as Harsanyi suggests, that Americans find such attitudes insulting. I am no longer sure they do. Many seem pleased to be managed. They want judges and bureaucrats to make decisions for them.
That preference should trouble anyone who still cares about constitutional government.
North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Asked To Address Illegal Immigrant Train Stabbing in Charlotte, Instead Issues Statement Attacking GOP Opponent as ‘Big Oil Lobbyist’
As crime emerges at a flashpoint in the race for North Carolina’s vacant senate seat, leading Democrat Roy Cooper, who served as the state’s governor from 2017 through 2025, doesn’t want to talk about the uptick of seemingly random stabbing stabbings on the Charlotte light rail by violent repeat criminals. Cooper refused to comment on the latest attack, which was committed by a twice-deported illegal immigrant from Honduras with a lengthy criminal rap sheet, with his campaign instead sending the Washington Free Beacon an unrelated statement attacking his Republican opponent as a “Big Oil lobbyist.”
The post North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Asked To Address Illegal Immigrant Train Stabbing in Charlotte, Instead Issues Statement Attacking GOP Opponent as ‘Big Oil Lobbyist’ appeared first on .
‘A Foundation of My Politics’: Graham Platner Calls To Return Maine Land to ‘Indigenous Population’
Senate candidate Graham Platner (D., Maine) called to return land to natives in the state he’s running to represent, arguing that longstanding injustices committed by state and federal governments remain unresolved.
The post ‘A Foundation of My Politics’: Graham Platner Calls To Return Maine Land to ‘Indigenous Population’ appeared first on .
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