This Former Pizza Hut Is Now The Liquor Hut

Pizza Huts are distinctive buildings. They’re so distinctive that there’s really nothing else like a Pizza Hut in the chain restaurant landscape. They have steep mansard roofs, brick exterior walls, and trapezoidal windows, and it takes significant renovation for them to not look like Pizza Huts anymore. That’s why we appreciate when new occupants surrender to their destiny and just call their new venture a “Hut.”

For example, there’s The Liquor Hut in Blackwood, New Jersey, which we learned about from the amazing site Used To Be a Pizza Hut. While that site uses the store’s existence as an opportunity to bash New Jersey, we’d like to point out that the real lesson here is about embracing the inevitable. Your store was, and will always be recognizable as, a Pizza Hut. Embrace that. Make the most obvious thing about the exterior of the store something that also makes it instantly recognizable from the road and serves as a marketing hook.

This doesn’t work for all businesses, of course. While I would definitely choose to make my final arrangements at a Funeral Hut, if a funeral home in a former Pizza Hut decided to use that name, most people probably wouldn’t.

It’s disappointing, though, that there is more than one Christian church in a former Pizza Hut, and neither of them is called Jesus Hut. This is a lost opportunity, and deeply disappointing.