Patch Readers Help Save Paoli Pizza Hut

The Pizza Hut in Paoli Village Shoppes is staying open thanks in large measure to Patch Readers.

Paoli Pizza Hut General Mnager tells TEPatch the store got an 11th hour save from the Pizza Hut national franchise after customers and people who read the articles about the closing Thursday morning on TE Patch.

The store had been asking customers to return their customer satisfcation surveys in order to show the people at Pizza Hut headquarters how popular the carr out and deliver location has been for years and years. Paoli General Manager Russell Miller tells Patch nothing had worked and the store was set to be closed on Thursday at 10 p.m..  Failed efforts to negotiate a new lease was behind the decision to close. Basically, Pizza Hut didn't want to sign the new lease that was being offered by the landlord.

By Thursday night that all changed.

According to Miller, customers and huge numbers of people who read the closing story on TE Patch, didn't just fill out the customer satisfaction surveys-they called the Pizza Hut corporate number to express their outrage over the store's announced closing.

A smiling, relieved, and grateful Miller says enough people flooded the Pizza Hut headquarters with calls to prompt the corporate franchise director to decide the store needed to be kept open despite the lease situation.

As a result Pizza Hut is staying put in Paoli-at least for now. Miller says the store may look for another location nearby but now it will not shut down while that process goes on.

You Saved a Dozen Jobs

Miller says he got word of the decision Thursday just before closing time that was to have been the closing-for-good time. Most employees had already gone home and figured they were out of work, at least temporarily.

He started calling his employees with the news and had no troubles getting people to come back to work on Friday. "Everybody was just so happy that they had their jobs back," Miller told TE Patch Friday night.

Long time Pizza Hut employee Doug Reed summed up the feeling among the store's staff who have formed a bond with customers over the several decades the store has been in Paoli "We're very grateful that people called," Reed says. "We've known a lot of these customers for a long time."

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