Arby's June 16, 1970 Ad

June 16, 1970 Lorain Journal ad

Although many of the old ads I feature on this blog are for long-gone restaurants, here's one that's still around (in a slightly newer version, that is, since the restaurant was rebuilt years ago).

The ad is for the Arby's Roast Beef Sandwich restaurant on Griswold Road near Midway Mall, and is from the pages of the June 16, 1970 Lorain Journal.

I have mixed feelings about Arby's, which I've mentioned before in this blog. Here's my er, uh beef.

When Arby's first opened in the 1960's, each store used to have a big cut of beef hanging from a chain, roasting, visible to all who entered the store. When it was ready to be sliced, it was taken down and another one was hung in its place.

The roast beef was sliced super-thin, and was nice and pink. When you added the Arby's barbecue sauce, there was no better sandwich around.

Classic Griswold Road store sign

Today, Arby's sells processed roast beef that's basically lunch meat. All the Arby's sauce in the world won't make it taste like those sandwiches of the 1960's, and more's the pity.

A look at Arby's menu today, with several chicken sandwiches, gives the impression that their roast beef sandwiches alone aren't causing customers to stampede to their stores. (Maybe beef isn't 'what's for dinner' any more!)

Incidentally, I always thought that the 'Arby' name was a play on 'RB' as in Roast Beef. But the company's wiki page indicates that it stands for the name of the founders, the Raffel Brothers.

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By the way, in preparation for this posting, I had an Arby's Roast Beef Sandwich for dinner last night (we were a little burned out on our usual Friday pizza). Since it had been about ten years since I had one, I felt that to maintain my journalistic integrity (what little I have as a blogger) I needed to sample one.

I'm sad to say it isn't any better than the last one I had. I loaded on the Arby's sauce (which was nice and tangy) but the roast beef was still flavorless and grey. The toasted bun was top-notch, but the sandwich as a whole was disappointing.

Oh well, I'll have another one in ten years.