WHY WIMPY (STILL) WORKS

Last year, Famous Brands shut the doors of 96 SA restaurants, including Wimpy outlets. But the CEO says Wimpy isn’t past its sell-by date

For a brief instant as a child, I was a Wimpy advertising star. At one of Joburg’s inner city Wimpy restaurants near Eloff Street, I become the implausibly delighted wide-eyed kid, biting into the sort of manicured burgers you’d never actually get over the counter, while an irritable photographer manhandled the props.

After each take, a new burger magically appeared before me, until the mechanics of biting began to overwhelm me. I was paid R50 for the trouble — a ridiculous amount of money for a child in the early 1980s. I still suspect my parents took a cut.

For a time after it opened its first restaurant in Durban in 1967, Wimpy’s American diner-style red-andwhite interiors were as fundamental to local culture as Ford Bantams, Marie biscuits and Chappies bubblegum.

Billing itself as “the Home of the Hamburger”, Wimpy reaching its zenith in the 1980s when it claimed to be the first SA restaurant to serve all races. Kids would hold parties there, submersing the odd brown-grey patties in a gurgling sea of luminous red tomato sauce and glowing synthetic yellow mustard.

Yet now we read that Wimpy, the quintessentially SA fast-food chain, is shutting stores in inner Joburg. Does this suggest Wimpy has run its course? Has demand vanished for its famous coffee?

Famous Brands CEO Darren Hele doesn’t think so at all. “It remains an iconic part of the evolving SA landscape,” he says. “If you have visited a Wimpy restaurant recently, you will have noticed we are rolling out a new corporate identity, to ensure the brand remains fresh and exciting.”

Though Famous Brands closed 96 outlets in SA, it actually opened 169 new ones, and revamped 240