Private Equity Firm Bought Friendly’s and Then Watched Ninety Percent of It Disappear

The last Friendly's inside Boston city limits closed for good back in 2024.

That closure was only one chapter in a story now spreading across eleven states.

A Wall Street private equity firm bought this beloved ice cream empire, and here's what happened to ninety percent of it.

A Florida Investment Firm Took Over an American Childhood

Friendly's started in 1935 with two teenage brothers and a nickel ice cream cone.

By the mid-1990s it had grown into an 850-restaurant institution stretching across the Northeast.

Then in 2007, Sun Capital Partners – a Florida-based private equity firm – bought the chain for $337 million.

Four years later, Friendly's filed for bankruptcy, closing 100 restaurants and wiping out $297 million in debt.

That should have been the bottom.

It wasn't.

The Closures Never Stopped

Twenty-three more restaurants closed across five states in the spring of 2019, leaving the chain with 174 locations.

Friendly's filed for bankruptcy a second time in 2020, selling to Amici Partners Group for barely $2 million while lenders wiped out another $88 million in debt.

Those lenders operated under the name Sun Ice Cream Finance, an entity affiliated with the very same Sun Capital that started this slide thirteen years earlier.

In March 2024, the last Friendly's inside Boston city limits – the one tucked inside Logan Airport – shut its doors, and a Buffalo Wild Wings moved in.

Today there are just 87 Friendly's left in 11 states, according to Fox News.

Twenty-two of those sit in Massachusetts, the company's own home turf.

That's a 90 percent drop from the chain's mid-1990s peak.

Wharton Says the Brand Still Has Life Left

Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told Fox News the chain has "a lot of life left."

Kahn says nostalgia can pull customers back through the door if Friendly's modernizes fast enough.

That's easy to say from a business school office.

It's harder to believe after two bankruptcies and a 90 percent shrinkage in thirty years.

Friendly's Is Not an Isolated Case, It's a Business Model

Sun Capital didn't just buy Friendly's.

The same firm also owns Johnny Rockets, another chain that's been quietly shrinking for years.

Sizzler filed bankruptcy in 2020 and now runs about 80 locations, down from more than 700 at its peak.

Chi-Chi's disappeared entirely and only just resurfaced in Minnesota, twenty years after its last location shut down.

Red Lobster tells the exact same story with better-known lobster tails.

A private equity firm bought Red Lobster in 2014, then turned around and sold the ground underneath its own restaurants for $1.5 billion and started charging rent the company never had to pay before.

That single maneuver is a big reason Red Lobster wound up in bankruptcy ten years later, according to NBC News.

Even Senator Elizabeth Warren – no friend of ours, and no friend of the conservative movement – has been forced to admit that private equity "guts everything," pointing to Joann, Toys "R" Us, and Sears as proof.

When Elizabeth Warren and a Fox News reader can agree on something, it's probably true.

The Pattern Nobody in the C-Suite Wants You to Notice

Here's what actually fires people up about this story once you connect the dots.

These aren't struggling mom-and-pop diners that simply ran out of customers.

These are brands bought by financial firms with no real interest in cheese fries, sundaes, or shrimp – only in what the name and the real estate underneath it were worth on paper.

The debt gets loaded on, the rent gets jacked up, and when the numbers stop working, executives blame "changing demographics" instead of the balance sheet somebody else stuck them with.

Meanwhile the families who spent thirty years taking their kids there for Friday night sundaes are the ones left holding an empty building.

Nostalgia won't fix a company that's still dragging around three decades of financial engineering.

Until the ownership model changes, expect the next headline about Friendly's – or the next childhood brand on this list – to read exactly like this one.

Sources:

• Teresa Mull, "Beloved Restaurant Chain Dwindles From 850 Locations to 87, but Expert Sees 'A Lot of Life Left,'" Fox News, September 19, 2026.
• Danny Klein, "Friendly's Shutters 23 Restaurants in 'Tough Decision,'" FSR Magazine, April 8, 2019.
• Nancy Luna, "Friendly's Closes 23 Locations in 5 States," Nation's Restaurant News, April 9, 2019.
• "Not a Friendly Town: The Last Boston Friendly's Has Closed," Boston.com, March 24, 2024.
• "Friendly's Declares Bankruptcy, Will Be Sold to Owner of Red Mango," Restaurant Business, 2020.
• "Sizzler Returns: Revamped Steakhouse Bets on Nostalgia to Win Back Diners," FOX 26 Houston, November 18, 2025.
• "Defunct Tex-Mex Restaurant Chain Chi-Chi's Is Mounting a Comeback," Mental Floss, 2024.
• "How Private Equity Rolled Red Lobster," NBC News, 2024.
• "Elizabeth Warren Says 'Endless Shrimp' Wasn't Red Lobster's 'Real Downfall' — Here's What She Blames," Yahoo Finance, 2024.