Nothing says “We’re making a comeback” like opening your first ever mall location in the 2010s.

Shoney's breakfast buffet was legendary. I grew up eating there on occasion. The french toast sticks were out of this world.

Sometimes my family would stop at Shoney's back in the 1980s on the way to visit Disneyworld. What I remember most isn't the food, but the how amused my dad was by the enthusiastic way the hostess would greet customer's when entering the restaurant. Every time we'd pass another Shoney's he'd repeat the line "Welcome to Shoney's!" I can't say I miss eating at Shoney's but I sure do miss my dad.

I started as a busboy and left as a relief manager. I worked from 1986-1998 and I can tell you that the upkeep of the stores and lots were horrible at the end. The stores had tired looks and the food needed to be improved. The company had no direction.

As someone from central europe, I have never ever heard of Shoney's until it was referenced in one Rick & Morty episode, at which point I thought it was a made up restaurant...imagine my surprise when I suddenly saw one while visiting Orlando, Florida in 2017. After spending the day at Universal we went in there, paid for the all you can eat buffet and brutally stuffed ourselves...good times.

I have a Shoney Bear that was my Childhood Stuffed Bear. It's unbelievably precious to me, and I'll always remember Shoney's fondly for that alone.

Always interesting how restaurants can go from popular to dead in such a short time. Even a change of management can be disastrous.

This made me tear up. Not because of shoneys but how it like so many other things from my childhood (the 90s) has came to an end and all we left with is the nostalgia. 😣

I am 23 years old. For most of my life my grandfather would go to Shoney’s for the breakfast bar and also the cooks their would make his eggs how he likes it. It was soft scrambled.Often we would meet him for breakfast and we would celebrate birthdays and certain holidays by eating at Shoney’s. The one near us closed down in 2019 and is now a high end brandy bar. It barely changed over the years and that location was on it’s last legs. It was also a place we would stop to eat during road trips. Shoney’s will always be special to me. I will always look back fondly. Especially since my cousin and grandma have died in the past 4 years.

When I was a kid my family would always do the Shoney's breakfast all you can eat every vacation. I hadn't thought about them since then, so this is a weirdly bittersweet episode.

To anyone wondering why Marriott owned a restaurant, it was just one of many they owned. They started as a restaurant company in the 1920’s and didn’t even open a hotel until the 60’s. They stayed mainly in the restaurant business until the mid to late 80’s before either closing or selling everything besides the hotel. Why? Hotels have a higher profit margin than restaurants due to the fluctuating price of ingredients and other often uncontrollable factors and Reagan’s tax reforms suddenly dramatically increased taxation on restaurants. McDonald's and Burger King lobbied and got the reforms repealed (one of the very few times those two companies have ever worked together) but Mariott noped out and chose to go with the safer bet.

In 1977, when I was 17, I worked at the Shoney's in Marietta, GA. We had a big fiberglass Big Boy that the local high schools would occasionally kidnap to put on the roof of their school building or some similar prank. We never worried about it, as the schools were pretty good about bringing him back after the homecoming event or prom or whatever it was. Shortly after that, though, we did get the Bear branding and said goodbye to the Big Boy statue. My friends and I would work closing, which included dishes and cleaning the place which often took until 5AM, then we would go bowling. Those were the days!

As a kid in the late 70’s/early 80’s, Shoney’s was known as a Breakfast place. Then they introduced the Breakfast Bar, which meant all you can eat bacon, which was just awesome. At the time, their competition were greasy spoon diners which felt non-family friendly and suffered from the typical trait of single location restaurants being of unknown expectations if you’d never been there before. This was important, because the main customer base were travelers, since at the time, households almost exclusively ate breakfast at home. At the time, mainstream Fast Food places were still being retrofitted to add drive-thrus and were just trying to figure out how to cook breakfast, since their workers were basically food preppers, not short order cooks.

Two more points. 1) there was also a lawsuit following the discrimination lawsuit for labor violations regarding unpaid overtime, working employees off the clock, etc., which was also over $100 million iirc. 2) Lonestar sold off Shoney's prime locations to recoup their investment, then dumped the remaining locations, which were unprofitable, with Doudapour as the buyer.

My grandpa LOVED Shoney's biscuits and gravy. Said it was the best he'd had that wasn't homemade. I have fond memories of going there during trips to the Ozarks to visit my grandparents.

Y'know, I still think it's such a shame how restaurants like Shoney's and Ryan's have fallen to the wayside but absolutely mid tier restaurants like Golden Corral who's pique was in the mid 2000's are still going... I really miss Ryan's, would love to see you do a video on them

I'm 42. In the 80s, my parents used to take me to Shoney's every Saturday when I was a little kid. They had a great salad bar, good fish n chips and hot fudge cake! Today, there aren't any in Montgomery, AL, but there are a couple 40 miles to the north and south of me I think. Thanks for the nostalgia! PS- Fifth Quarter and Lee's were also amazing. Miss them, too!

Can't believe the Abandoned series is almost 100 episodes in. It's amazing what Jake has built and the history and information he's provided for years. Nearly a generation, it feels like. That might sound extra but it's true when you consider the entirety of the Bright Sun Films video catalog, and the hours of content and research provided by it. great stuff!!

I am 54 years old, and I remember Shoney's well. Shoney's was huge in the 70s and 80s. There was one in pretty much every decent sized town in the south, and they were always busy! A Big Boy Burger with fries, and a hot fudge cake for dessert! Simple, pleasant childhood memories!

I didn't discover Shoney's until the mid-late 90s. I worked nights and slept days, and found the breakfast bar made a good supper. Sometimes I ate there on Saturday evenings. Then came the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The food bar had some leftover thanksgiving items. They were old but still good to eat. On Sunday, I had a major case of the runs - food poisoning. I should have known better than eat three-day-old buffet food. But that which does not kill you makes you stronger, and I was back after a couple of months. This time, Shoney's was a ghost town. It was never that busy, but there were hardly any customers. I guess I wasn't the only one to have a bad Sunday. The restaurant closed not long after that.