Does anyone know why the Ground Round Restaurant chain closed abruptly on Friday 02/13/04?
Here is what I know so far. On Friday evening, at the height of the dinner hour, corporate offices were on conference call with managers of some 400 Ground Round Restaurants across the country. Following this call, which lasted approximately 30 minutes, managers instructed the employees to ask patrons to leave the stores, although many were in the middle of meals. Employees were then told to lock doors and told that they had 35 minutes to vacate the premises. I know that the chain declared bankruptcy. What I am confused about is why corporate choose to close the stores in the manner in which they did instead of waiting until the end of the evening. Obviously, transactions remained incomplete and routine, end of the work day cash outs were unable to be met. How was this decision made? Thank you.

I have found speculation by managers (who received the order but were not told why) that it was some sort of bank takeover that forced them to do that. Interestingly, some restaurants closed immediately, some waited for patrons to finish their meals, and a few are still open. The ones that are still open are locally-owned franchises, while the ones that closed were owned by the larger corporation.

dcamp - You'd think that they'd have the courtesy of waiting until the end of the business day. That manouver was rather rude and unnecessary. What's the point of shutting the establishment down 2 hours early? How does this benefit anyone?

Sounds like a power trip.

Tree, from what I am able to gather, the restaurants were going to have to close because they were bankrupt. I guess the bank (receiver) was calling in their loan. Corporate was angry, perhaps frustrated, when told to close their doors. Out of this frustration, the decision was made to close on the spot instead of handing in any more monies to the bank. Had they remained open until closing, they would have had to account for all revenue taken in for the day and all servers, etc would have had to cash in. I guess the abrupt close was kind of a "well then we'll fix you" attitude. Childish perhaps, but most likely done out of frustration.