The hand-printed sign on the door reads “Closed for good.”
Those words are being read by many disappointed people this holiday weekend, despite our cooler temperatures. And they certainly make one wonder: How can it be a good thing that the Durango Dairy Queen, a local favorite for 39 years in that location, has closed?
It’s certainly not good that two dozen employees, most of them gaining their first work experience, are out of a job. Nor is it good that a steady employer of young people in town is gone.
A great many local folks can point to the building at 2817 Main Avenue as the location of their first job. And while the pay was mostly minimal and the pace could be frantic, Dairy Queen employees almost always looked like they were having a good time. It’s hard to put that trademark curl on an ice cream cone when you are in a bad mood.
Gone as well is a location that local parents depended on for that sweet, trump card of a bribe to wrap up a long day’s adventure in the mountains. “No, I don’t want to carry you,” went the refrain on the last quarter-mile of the trail from Spud Lake back to the car. “But if you walk all the way, we’ll stop at Dairy Queen on the way home.”
Owner Tim Sapa, who operated the business for 11 years, wrote the sign on the door. He means, of course, that the doors of Dairy Queen, in that location, won’t be open again. The property has sold. The new owner may very well open the building as a restaurant, but it won’t sport the DQ livery that has made the chain an iconic symbol of small-town America since the first one opened in 1940. Sapa has left another message for local folks on the street sign: “Thanks Durango.”
Speculation about what will replace Dairy Queen is running along fast-food lines. The new owner, Josh Skarsgard of Albuquerque, runs a Del Taco in Farmington, and currently has two more restaurants, a Five Guys (burgers and fries) and a Chick-fil-A, under construction in that city. Any one of those brands might do well on north Main, though a Del Taco near Escalante Middle School did not succeed and was replaced by a Durango Joe’s.
And while Durango might be good to another fast-food option, would more fast food necessarily be good to Durango?
A recent study at George Washington University found that people who consume fast food tend to have significantly higher levels of certain chemicals in their bodies – specifically phthalates – that have been linked to a number of health problems in both adults and children. Their presence in fast food, the study implies, comes not from the food itself, but from the significant amount of processing and packaging most fast food undergoes before being served.
The popularity of fast-food chains in this country, and along Main Avenue, testifies to the fact that Americans don’t tend to think of our health first when in the throes of hunger pangs or on a lunch break crunched for time.
That might bode well for another fast-food restaurant, but perhaps not for us.
It’s food for thought.
