There Goes The Steak n’ Shake
There goes the Steak n’ Shake in Augusta.
Remember back to the fall of 2012. Can you? Let me help. On September 27th 2012, the Steak n’ Shake opened on Jimmie Dyess Parkway in Augusta.
Remember the first couple of months. It was almost impossible to get near the place, because they were serving…wait for it…hamburgers! And MILK SHAKES! We hadn’t seen anything like that before, or at least you would have thought so. It was a few months before things calmed down, enabling us to just casually go through the drive-thru in a nice, orderly fashion.
Oh, remember when they added all of those Tesla charging stations? What? For what? Well, working in this area, and driving past the restaurant every day, I can tell you that those charging stations went from no one using them to them getting a fair amount of use.
That’s all coming to a crashing halt. The Steak n’ Shake has closed. Yep, after all of that fanfare more than a decade ago, it couldn’t sustain the business. I hate it. I hate seeing businesses, any business close it doors. Especially when it was the only Steak n’ Shake in the area.
Whenever something like this happens, I tend to look inward. I did it when the Whole Foods shut down. We didn’t support it as their research said we would. I always believe there was research. These major corporations don’t just throw darts at a map to see where they need to expand. They calculate, meet, meet again before making the decision. In this case, they seemed to be wrong.
You can say, it just wasn’t what we wanted or needed. You might be right. I can tell you it will make other companies think long and hard before deciding to expand to the CSRA. I know this, with the proliferation of the Mexican restaurants we have in town, most of them, very similar, there’s no way some large national Mexican chain will or should even sniff around this area.
It’s unfortunate. I hate to see it go. If you travel the Interstate highway system, you’ll know it’s not the first Steak n’ Shake to close. But it was OUR Steak n’ Shake.