Retail History | Taco Bell — Nineteen Cents at 7112 Firestone
· 1962-3
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Retail History | Taco Bell — Nineteen Cents at 7112 Firestone
kevin
People treat Yum as a Louisville holding company that always owned three logos.
The taco book began as a twenty-by-twenty stucco stand in Downey.
On 21 March 1962 Glen Bell opened the first Taco Bell at 7112 Firestone Boulevard.
The architect Robert McKay gave it Mission arches and a metal bell on the roof.
The opening menu listed tacos, burritos in red or green, tostadas, frijoles, and chili burgers, each at nineteen cents in 1962 dollars.
Bell had already run Bell's Drive-In and Bell's Hamburgers in San Bernardino, then Taco Tia and El Taco with partners.
He sold his El Taco stake and built this one stand as sole proprietor.
The first franchisee, a retired Los Angeles policeman named Kermit Becky, signed in 1964.
The hundredth shop opened in Anaheim in 1967.
Bell took the chain public in 1970 with 325 restaurants in the West.
PepsiCo later bought it.
In 1997 Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut left PepsiCo as Tricon Global Restaurants, renamed Yum! Brands.
The Downey building stopped selling food in 1986.
In 2015, facing demolition, the original stand was lifted onto a flatbed and moved forty-five miles to 1 Glen Bell Way, the Irvine headquarters parking lot, and labeled Numero Uno.
The pin stays on the Firestone lot where the nineteen-cent taco first left a walk-up window.
Photo: public streetscape of Downey, via Wikimedia Commons.
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