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"Al Yeganeh appreciates rules. You may be familiar with some of them. Move to the left. Have your money ready. No chitchat. Don't want to follow Yeganeh's rules? Then good luck getting his soup, as the world discovered when Seinfeld immortalized Yeganeh as the Soup Nazi in a 1995 episode.
"But for all his rules for running the soup counter, it is mostly by ignoring the rules of business that Yeganeh built a small New York City storefront into a multimillion-dollar company. Customer service, obviously, was never a priority. Free publicity he could do without. Yeganeh despises the Soup Nazi nickname and has complained that the hordes of Seinfeld fans lining up in front of his shop have ruined his life.
"Despite those obstacles and a decade after his initial fame (so much for speed to market), Yeganeh is taking his soup store national. He and a group of partners are expanding the Fifth Avenue tourist magnet (a few blocks from the modest original location) into a 1,000-store franchise called the Original SoupMan. Seventeen are open, with plans for 23 more this year in the U.S. and Canada. Yeganeh has also begun selling packaged soup in grocery stores in 14 states."
