By Carol Dawson

Scarred by way of the deaths of his mom and sisters and the failure of his father's company, a tender guy dreamed of creating sufficient cash to retire early and retreat into the safe international that his formative years tragedies had torn from him. yet Harry Luby refused to be a robber baron. Turning absolutely opposed to the tide of avaricious capitalism, he decided to make a fortune by means of doing stable. beginning with that not likely, even naive, ambition in 1911, Harry Luby based a cafeteria empire that by way of the Eighties had sales moment merely to McDonald's. So effectively did Luby and his heirs fulfill the tastes of the United States that Luby's turned the country's biggest cafeteria chain, growing extra millionaires in line with capita between its staff than the other company of its measurement. much more incredible, the corporate stayed actual to Harry Luby's imaginative and prescient for 8 a long time, earning money via treating its consumers and staff incredibly good. Written with the sweep and drama of a unique, apartment of lots tells the engrossing tale of Luby's founding and out of the ordinary progress, its future as America's favourite kinfolk eating place in the course of the post-World battle II a long time, its monetary failure in the course of the greed-driven Nineteen Nineties whilst non-family management jettisoned the company's confirmed enterprise version, and its contemporary fight again to solvency. Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston draw on insider tales and corporate files to recapture the forces that propelled the corporate to its maximum heights, together with its remarkable practices of permitting shop managers to maintain forty percentage of internet gains and issuing inventory to all staff, which allowed hundreds of thousands of Luby's employees to accomplish the yank dream of in truth earned prosperity. The authors additionally plumb the depths of the Luby's drama, together with a hushed-up robbery that cut up the relatives for many years; the 1991 mass taking pictures on the Killeen Luby's, which splattered the company's sturdy identify throughout headlines national; and the rapacious over-expansion that greater than doubled the company's measurement in 9 years (1987-1996), driven it into chapter 11, and drove president and CEO John Edward Curtis Jr. to violent suicide. Disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's adage that "there aren't any moment acts in American lives," residence of lots tells the epic tale of an iconic American establishment that has risen, fallen, and located redemption—with no curtain name in sight.