Checkers (fast food)

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Checkers Drive-In Restaurants, Inc. is an American fast-food restaurant chain operating under the names Checkers and Rally's Hamburgers. In June of 2006, the Company went private through a merger with Taxi Holdings Corp., an affiliate of Wellspring Capital Management LLC, a private equity firm.

Currently, the company operates 407 Checkers restaurants and 389 Rally's restaurants across the country. They both specialize in hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, and milkshakes. The menus of the two restaurants are nearly identical, differing in that Checkers menu includes additional hamburgers (including the original Champ hamburger) and Rally's offers cups of chili. Over time, the Checkers menu grew in size to include chicken and fish sandwiches, chicken strips, and a wider selection of hamburgers.

Checkers restaurants follow a retro theme with abundant use of chrome flashing, neon tube lighting, and black and white checkered tiling. To reinforce recognizability and minimize costs, Checkers predominantly uses prefabricated restaurant units that consist of a main food preparation building and twin drive-thru windows. As a facet of the unique facility design, most stores do not have inside seating; instead, one can either drive in and pick up food or sit outside under an umbrella at a patio table. If one chooses the latter option, he or she is able to walk up to the traffic window in front of the establishment and order there instead of using a car.

Originally separate companies serving different geographic areas, Checkers and Rally's Hamburgers, Inc. merged in August 1999. The joint company houses its headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Checkers was founded in 1986 in Mobile, Alabama, and went public in 1991. Rally's was founded in Louisville, Kentucky in 1985, with its first location in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

In 2005, Checkers and Rally's became the "Official Drive-Thru and Official Burger of NASCAR". They sponsor Bill Lester's entry in the Craftsman Truck Series.

Checkers will expand into the state of Minnesota with its first restaurant opening in the Twin Cities in the suburb of West St.Paul sometime in the spring of 2007.