Little Caesars

Mike and Marian Ilitch opened Little Caesar's Pizza Treat in a Garden City, Michigan strip mall on May 8, 1959, with a simple idea: make the best pizza affordable and accessible. The first franchise followed in Warren, Michigan in 1962, and the concept grew steadily through the 1970s on a two-for-one deal the chain had been running since the early part of that decade. In 1979 the deal finally got its immortal name — "Pizza! Pizza!" — and it meant something concrete: two pizzas for roughly the price of a single competitor's pie. It was arithmetic that kids understood and parents appreciated.

The 1990s became Little Caesars' golden age on television. Absurd, joke-first commercials from Cliff Freeman & Partners — the shop of the adman who wrote Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" — made the toga-wearing Little Caesar mascot and his playful spear the lingua franca of Saturday morning cartoons and after-school reruns. The tagline ricocheted through playgrounds and school lunches, and the chain had reached all 50 states by 1987. In 1997, the company crystallized its identity with Hot-N-Ready: a large pepperoni pizza for $5, always waiting, no order ahead, with employees shaking signs at the curb. It was the "Pizza! Pizza!" promise distilled to its essence—speed, value, and the thrill of impulse carryout.

Little Caesars stayed family-owned under Ilitch Holdings (headquartered in Detroit), weathering leaner years in the mid-90s — 184 stores closed in 1996 alone as delivery rivals squeezed carryout — and the pizza wars of the 2000s. Between 2008 and 2015 it became the fastest-growing pizza chain in the United States. Today it ranks as the third-largest U.S. pizza chain by sales, behind Domino's and Pizza Hut, with 5,463 locations globally as of 2017—a figure that still traces back to that strip-mall origin nearly six decades earlier.