Friendly's Restaurants was always considered a casual dining eatery, mostly in the Northeast, known for its signature ice-cream, sandwiches and burgers, a place to dine with family and friends. Until, that is, its restaurants started to get run-down and the menu didn't adapt to the times.

Dayton is known as the home of many inventions. Some of most famous are aviation, the cash register, the hydraulic jump to prevent flooding, code-breaking machines that helped end World War II and the pop top. The Dayton Peace Accords signed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1995 ended the Bosnian War.

By 1974, Friendly's was a chain of 500 restaurants concentrated in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. In keeping with their customers' habit of making the brand name possessive, the apostrophe “s” was added to the name in 1989, making the restaurants truly “Friendly's.”