Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike D
And suddenly I'm concerned for Athens, Georgia...desperate for a Steak n Shake? Really, Athens? Really???
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That's probably the biggest opening here in years, but there
is at least a bit of backstory to that.
Although they're all over the Atlanta suburbs the nearest one to Athens was almost an hour away, down in Gwinnett County where there are 4-5 of them. Three guesses which county sends the most students to UGA.
So you've got a built-in loyal audience in the student body combined with a series of rumors & false starts that had the whole town expecting one to open going back at least 3-4 years & probably more (I heard rumors not long after we arrived & that was about 8 years ago).
So you've got an audience, you've got anticipation ... and we're talking about the best fries in the business today. Then you put the small'ish model of the store on a lot the size of a postage stamp and you end up with literally months of wall to wall people & a traffic situation that required at least two people directing traffic in/out of the lot at all times. It finally cooled down after a couple of semesters but it was truly insane with waits of 30-90 minutes pretty much the whole time prior to that.