Sonic Drive-In

• 1. Introduction

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  Sonic Drive-In began in 1953 as a walk-up root beer stand called the Top Hat, somewhere in Oklahoma. Today it counts more than 3,400 locations across the United States. Since 2018 it has belonged to Inspire Brands, the parent of Arby's, Jimmy John's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin'.

  Its founder was Troy N. Smith Sr., and he had no grand plan for a national chain. So how did a small roadside stand become a name known coast to coast? Why do carhops on roller skates still carry food to parked cars, and why does the company hold a yearly contest to crown its best skater?

  And what becomes of an Oklahoma original once a larger corporate family takes it over?

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• 2. Root Beer and Intercoms

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  After World War II, Troy N. Smith Sr. returned to his hometown of Seminole, Oklahoma, and took a job as a milkman. He soon switched to delivering bread, for a reason that was purely practical. Bread is lighter than milk.

  His next step was the Cottage Cafe, a small diner in Shawnee, Oklahoma, which he bought. He did not hold on to it for long. He sold it and opened a fast-food business on the edge of town called Troy's Pan Full of Chicken.

  In 1953, Smith and a business partner bought a five-acre parcel of land. It held a log house and a walk-up root beer stand that already went by the name Top Hat. The partners kept the stand running and turned the log house into a steak restaurant.

  The numbers then made Smith's decision for him. The stand was averaging $700 a week from root beer, hamburgers and hot dogs. He chose to focus on it and bought out his partner.

  The next big change came not from the menu but from the parking lot.

  At first, Top Hat customers left their cars anywhere on the gravel and walked up to order. During a trip to Louisiana, Smith saw a drive-in where customers placed orders through speakers. He suspected that controlled parking, speakers at each car, and carhops carrying the food out would raise his sales.

  To test the layout, Smith borrowed several automobiles from a friend who owned a used-car lot. Then some so-called jukebox boys wired an intercom system across the lot. Sales tripled right away.

  That jump in business drew attention well beyond Shawnee.

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• 3. A Handshake Franchise

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  Charles Woodrow Pappe, an entrepreneur, was so impressed by the Shawnee drive-in that he wanted a piece of the idea. He and Smith agreed on the first franchise location, in Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1956. The deal rested on a handshake.

  By 1958, two more drive-ins had been built, in Enid and in Stillwater.

  The name was the next obstacle. Smith and Pappe learned that Top Hat was already trademarked, so in 1959 they switched to Sonic. The new name fit their existing slogan, "Service with the Speed of Sound."

  The first Sonic sign went up at the Stillwater Top-Hat Drive-In, the first of three Sonics that Stillwater would eventually have. That original building with the first sign was demolished and renovated in May 2015.

  Money was a harder puzzle. Other people kept asking Smith and Pappe for help opening locations, yet no royalty plan existed. Their solution came from their paper company, which charged one extra penny for each Sonic-label hamburger bag it sold. The pair split the proceeds.

  The first franchise contracts were written under that arrangement. They still came with no joint marketing plan, no standard menu and no detailed operating rules.

  A penny a bag could not hold up a growing chain, and the 1960s brought the first attempt at real structure.

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• 4. Small Towns, Big Numbers

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  In the 1960s, Sonic's founders created Sonic Supply to handle supplies and distribution. Under Smith, two longtime franchise holders, Marvin Jirous and Matt Kinslow, were brought in to run it.

  In 1973, Sonic Supply was restructured as a franchise company, briefly called Sonic Systems of America. It gave franchisees equipment, building plans and basic operating instructions.

  During these years the drive-ins sat mostly in small towns in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Missouri and Arkansas. The count of locations shows how fast the idea spread. In 1967, the year Pappe died, the brand had 41 drive-ins. By 1972 there were 165, and by 1978 the figure reached 1,000.

  The menu grew along the way. In 1968, Sonic introduced Pickles-Os, which are fried pickle slices.

  In 1977, the company opened the Sonic School to train managers. Franchisees ran most of the drive-ins and often made the store manager a business partner. That arrangement still exists today.

  By the early 1980s, the company needed new leadership to match its size.

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• 5. Buyouts and Retrofits

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  In 1983, the board of directors hired C. Stephen Lynn as president. A year later he brought in attorney J. Clifford Hudson to lead the legal department.

  Lynn and the major franchisees pushed for local advertising cooperatives. Keith Sutterfield, first as advertising manager and later as vice president of marketing, built a field structure for working with franchisees. New franchises carried Sonic into fresh areas and back into markets where earlier attempts had failed.

  In 1986, Lynn and a group of investors completed a $10-million leveraged buyout, taking the company private. The next year the offices moved to leased space in downtown Oklahoma City, and Sonic began taking a higher profile in the community.

  Sonic returned to public trading in 1991. By 1994 it had renegotiated its agreements with franchisees.

  Through the mid-1990s, the chain opened between 100 and 150 new stores each year. Then, beginning in 1998, a program called "Sonic 2000" set out to update all 1,750 stores to what the company called a "retro-future" look.

  Sonic Corp. itself had been incorporated in Delaware back in 1990. Its headquarters in Oklahoma City has a dine-in Sonic restaurant in an adjacent building. Before the Inspire Brands deal, its stock traded on NASDAQ under the symbol SONC. Most restaurants are owned and run by franchisees, and total revenues in 2016 were around $100 million, with net income of $18 million.

  The retrofit gave the chain a fresh face, but a face needs someone to sell it.

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• 6. Selling the Speed of Sound

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  Sonic ran its first television advertisement in 1977. The campaign that did the most for its name began a decade later.

  From 1987 to 1993, singer and actor Frankie Avalon appeared in the company's ads. That campaign, together with the franchise expansion of those years, produced strong growth and a new image that made Sonic a nationally recognized name. In May 1999 a new campaign arrived, built around a character called Katie the Carhop.

  Racing offered another stage. In late 2000, Sonic contracted with Richard Childress Racing to be an associate sponsor for Dale Earnhardt Sr. during the 2001 NASCAR Winston Cup Series. Earnhardt died in an accident at the 2001 Daytona 500. Sonic stayed on with his replacement driver, Kevin Harvick, through the end of the 2003 season. It came back to NASCAR in 2015 to sponsor Sam Hornish Jr. and Richard Petty Motorsports.

  In 2004, Sonic began advertising in television markets hundreds of miles from its nearest franchise. That year, improvisational actors T. J. Jagodowski and Peter Grosz became familiar to American viewers through the "Two Guys" commercials. Other duos followed, including Molly Erdman and Brian Huskey, Katie Rich and Sayjal Joshi, and Emily Wilson and Tim Baltz.

  In late 2010, Sonic ended a 17-year relationship with the agency Barkley and chose a group of specialized agencies. Early in 2011, San Francisco-based Goodby Silverstein and Partners was named creative agency. In 2010 the company also held national auditions for a new series of ads, some featuring carhops from Wisconsin and Austin, Texas.

  The "Two Guys" returned in 2012. In 2018 they were joined by "Two Gals," played by Ellie Kemper and Jane Krakowski. In 2020 the formula shifted to a campaign called "Everyday People," with families in place of the pair of guys.

  The slogans tell their own story. Signs at many drive-ins in the 1980s said "Happy Eating." From 1990 to 1993 the line was "No Place Hops like Sonic," and from 2003 to 2011 it was "It's Sonic Good." In 2009 came "Even Sweeter After Dark," and from 2011 to 2020 "This is How You Sonic." The most recent in the source is "Live Free, Eat Sonic," from 2024.

  Back in the early 2000s, the company's other big change was not on screen but in the stalls.

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• 7. Satellites and Shakes

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  January 2000 brought Hudson the chairmanship of Sonic Corp. Two years later, in September 2002, the company introduced PartnerNet to its franchisees.

  PartnerNet was an intranet delivered through Hughes Satellite Services. For the first time it linked every Sonic Drive-In digitally to the corporation, and it brought credit card processing and video training. Its headline feature was Sonic Live Radio, produced by StudioStream Signature Sound. It had a toll-free request line, 866-SONIC-FM, and live on-air personalities.

  The live radio format was a first for corporate America, and Walmart later copied it. Sonic Live Radio had been in beta since 2001 and reached all locations in February 2003.

  That same year, the comedic reality show The Simple Life sent Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie to work at a Sonic in Altus, Arkansas. Neither had held a job before.

  Sonic celebrated its 50th birthday in 2003 with a briefly offered Birthday Cake Shake. Pickle-O's returned as a recurring item. The decade also brought milestones on the map, with the 3,000th drive-in opening in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and the 3,500th in Algonquin, Illinois, in the Chicago market.

  In October 2004, President Pattye Moore stepped down to spend more time with her family. At the start of 2005, Sonic began installing card readers in the stalls of its 544 company-owned locations, aiming to finish by the end of January. In 2007 the company opened its first stores in the Northeast, in Waretown, New Jersey.

  In 2009, Sonic teamed up with DonorsChoose.org on Limeades for Learning, its first cause marketing effort across the whole system. Public school teachers request supplies, and customers vote on how to spend more than $500,000 each autumn. In its first seven years, Sonic and its franchisees gave more than $6 million, affecting learning for more than 349,000 students.

  The recession of 2008-09 hit the chain hard anyway. In 2009 it posted several quarters of falling same-store sales.

  The next decade began with reformulations, retreats and a new owner.

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• 8. New Owners, New Questions

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  In January 2010, Sonic announced a switch to battery cage-free eggs and gestation crate-free pork. It also pledged to use controlled-atmosphere stunning for chickens in place of shackling and electrical stunning. The company later backtracked on these commitments and now faces public criticism.

  On the 17th of May 2010, Sonic reformulated its soft-serve to meet FDA standards and introduced Real Ice Cream. New hot dog items followed in June 2010 and February 2011. Today the core lineup includes the Chili Cheese Coney, the Sonic Cheeseburger Combo, Sonic Blasts, Master Shakes and Wacky Pack Kids Meals.

  In June 2011, the first location under the name Sonic Beach opened in Homestead, Florida. A second, in Fort Lauderdale that November, had no drive-in stalls because of its beachside site. Both had outdoor seating and flatscreen televisions, and both have since closed. A third opened in Miami Gardens, and a fourth in Lauderhill in January 2014.

  Sonic Beach sold popcorn shrimp, Philly cheesesteaks and pulled pork sandwiches, plus beer and wine. The remaining locations are now Sonic restaurants that keep the Sonic Beach logo.

  Meanwhile the traditional chain was filling in the map. In the mid-2010s it began refranchising and adding stores again. On the 26th of October 2015, the first Rhode Island location opened in Smithfield, and it reported 500 orders that day. In September 2017 the first Alaska location opened in Wasilla, with a second in Fairbanks a year later. Seven new stores were also planned for Hawaii.

  One promotion came from baseball. In 2018 a young fan gave St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Harrison Bader a tater tot. Bader later partnered with Sonic to sell "Bader Tots" at participating St. Louis area locations, and his Players Weekend jersey read "TOTS."

  On the 25th of September 2018, Atlanta-based Inspire Brands announced it would buy Sonic for $2.3 billion. The deal closed on the 7th of December 2018.

  Labor trouble followed. In February 2019, employees at three Ohio locations resigned together after management changes and an alleged 50% cut in the hourly pay rate. Sonic denied the claim about pay.

  In 2020, Sonic unveiled a new drive-in design with wider car docks and drive-thru lane, a more efficient kitchen layout and a new look. By March 2020, every location had indefinitely suspended patio dining because of COVID-19 but kept serving takeaway and pickup customers.

  On the 21st of November 2020, a mass shooting at the drive-thru of a Sonic Drive-In in Bellevue, Nebraska, killed two people and injured two others. A 23-year-old man was arrested. In March 2022 he pleaded guilty to all charges, including murder, attempted murder and arson. He asked for a death sentence but was ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation, and as of March 2026 he has not been sentenced.

  Also in 2020, Sonic added a tipping feature to its online ordering app. In 2021 it added a tip option at the stalls, the place where a carhop arrives with the order.

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