Bankruptcy. A casualty of a tough economic environment, rising commodity costs, and changing customer tastes, Friendly's announced it had filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed 63 stores in October 2011.

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.”