Sale of Friendly’s finalized by investor group; Restaurants to feature new menu items, ice cream flavors
Updated Jan 21, 2021;
Posted Jan 21, 2021
This Friendly s at 1094 Riverdale Road, West Springfield is closed and its 39 employees laid off due to the coronavirus. It s among the seven locations statewide that are closed at a cost of 197 full- and part-time jobs. (Don Treeger/ The Republican)
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Friendly’s restaurants are now under new ownership.
The sale of more than 100 corporate-owned and franchised restaurant locations to a Connecticut-based entity of restaurant operators and investors was finalized this week.
Friendly Ice Cream Corporation, the Western Massachusetts-based parent company of Friendly’s restaurants, announced in November that the company entered into a sale agreement with Amici Partners Group.
By Roger Rapoport Jan. 8, 2021Reprints
Mike Reddy for STAT
Hallie-Beth Hollister is a master at cold calling. She has to be.
She and a small team of psychiatric bed searchers are responsible for calling hospitals across Massachusetts any time a patient is in need of an inpatient psychiatric bed. At any given moment, 20 to 60 mental health patients are temporarily being cared for in one of the five hospital emergency departments covered by Behavioral Health Network, the Western Massachusetts-based emergency service provider where Hollister works. In complex cases, these searches have taken up to six weeks.
But unlike most health systems across the country, her team has a special tool to speed up that search: a dedicated, state-funded system to back them up. Massachusetts is home to a novel effort known as the Expedited Psychiatric Inpatient Admissions, or EPIA. Created in 2018 by the state’s mental health department, it is designed to cut the red tape to get psychiatric patients