The Story of How Chick-fil-A Borrowed “My Pleasure” from a Luxury Hotel
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, the origins of Chick-fil-A’s “my pleasure” catchphrase began in 2001. Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy’s version of the story begins with him visiting a Ritz-Carlton luxury hotel—a hotel his friend Horst Schulze co-founded. Here's Horst with the story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.3 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:18.3 | And up next a story about a founder. |
| 0:24.3 | And we love to tell founder's stories here on the show. |
| 0:31.8 | We love to tell stories of people who turn nothing into something. And here the storyteller is Horst Schulze, who co-founded the Rich Carlton Hotels in 1983 here in America. |
| 0:38.3 | And this story has a lot to do with service. |
| 0:41.3 | It has a lot to do with customers. |
| 0:43.3 | And it has to do also with a fellow Atlanta founder, |
| 0:47.3 | Truitt Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A |
| 0:51.3 | and where the phrase, my pleasure, came from. |
| 0:55.0 | We all talk about service. |
| 0:57.0 | Let me define service for a moment. |
| 1:00.0 | It starts the instant you make contact. |
| 1:03.0 | It doesn't start a second later. |
| 1:06.0 | It starts, in fact, within nine feet. |
| 1:09.0 | Why? |
| 1:10.0 | Because within nine feet, you make decisions about somebody |
| 1:14.1 | and they make a decision about you. So it starts with a great welcome, welcome. And then it |
| 1:20.5 | continues with complying to the guest wishes. And that complying is very simply that. I'm in that moment, it's not about me anymore. |
| 1:30.3 | It's not about my company. |
| 1:32.3 | It's about my customer. |
| 1:33.3 | I'm now here to help that customer to make it the right decision for him or her. |
... |
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