Place: Taco Bell
Lunch: Doritos Locos Taco Supreme (no tomato), Nachos Supreme (no tomato), Mug Root Beer
I FINALLY figured out why they put a card wrap around this taco shell. It's so you can gradually slide the taco along without actually touching it as you eat it, so you don't end up with orange hands covered in Doritos seasoning. Duh.
Twenty some-odd years ago in my North Dakota days, one of our local Hardee's was scheduled for replacement. Thanks to some new "fast track" construction process, they were going to demolish the existing building (an old Sandy's that had been remodeled into a modern but small Hardee's) and replace it with a whole new ground-up building. Which they insisted would be open for business exactly 30 days after the old one closed.
And it was. A complete property short of landscaping.
Amazing.
Flash forward to today, where this old Taco Bell, which sits in an old Sambo's building that I've complained about here over and over, is FINALLY being replaced by an actual Taco Bell spec building down the street. The first notices promoting the new location went up last October. The franchisee bragged that the new building would be pre-fabricated and shipped. So you'd think they could get this done fairly quickly, right?
Wrong.
Lot prep started months ago. And the building actually went up pretty quickly...maybe a week. Fully painted and everything else short of signage.
And then it sat there. And sat there.
For the past few weeks, the mud that surround it has started being paved. (Yes, they put the building up without so much as grading the parking area.) This has actually taken longer than it did to throw the building up.
All told, I wouldn't be surprised if from grading to opening took six months. To put up a prefab fast food building.
Our new Whole Foods isn't moving much faster. Construction started last October in an existing strip mall space once partly occupied by Best Buy (who moved into a smaller footprint next door). Whole Foods took down two exterior walls and rebuilt them, expanding their footprint to what's expected to be a 30,000 square-foot space. Small for them.
They got it all enclosed fairly quickly. The storefront was the only thing that didn't look finished for quite awhile.
And it sat there.
And sat there.
Signage went up a couple weeks back and windows started to be placed in front. So you could see in. And now you can see that it appears not a whole lot has been going on since October, except for duct work.
A few weeks ago, I noticed the Taco John's down the street was being boarded up. Kind of surprised me...they did a good business...until I discovered it wasn't closing. Some idiot drove their car into the front of it.
So they boarded up the affected area. And thus far have left it that way. No sign of ever having intentions of fixing it. As far as I can tell, the damage is limited to glass and framing. And I've seen it up close from the inside...they're still open for business.
Really? It's that hard?
I've lived in a lot of places. I travel to a lot of places. I just don't see construction taking this long elsewhere. It can't be a code thing...QuikTrip is building their first local Gen 3 location right across the street from the old Taco Bell, and they're flying right along.
It's just not this hard, people.
