News of Yellowknife A&W’s impending demise hit the city hard on Monday, demonstrating the continued love affair between the NWT capital and fast food.
Just as the closure of a downtown KFC made headlines nearly a decade earlier, the announcement that A&W will close at the end of December was immediately splashed across the CBC and Cabin Radio websites.
The Cabin Radio article alone had reached some 10,000 people via Facebook within three hours of publication. Only 20,000 people live in the city.
A&W occupies a prime downtown street corner in Yellowknife. The extraordinary reaction to its closure says as much about its role in the city’s complex social fabric as it does about Yellowknifers’ passion for Teen Burgers.
In online comment threads, past and present radio personalities described the city’s A&W as a meeting place. Indigenous residents described how Elders, in particular, use the restaurant as a convenient spot to pass the time with friends and food.
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“I would literally trade every other fast food in the city for this,” former Yellowknife North MLA Rylund Johnson wrote online, a comment seconded by multiple people. The city’s deputy mayor, Garett Cochrane, urged Johnson to take action and “become the burger baron of 49th, the patron of patties on Franklin and grand old man of the grill in Yellowknife.”
While there’s a Tim Hortons around the corner (albeit with no seats) and coffee shops like Birchwood and Javaroma are a stone’s throw away, something about A&W’s location made it an extremely visible feature of Yellowknife’s downtown.
The owners said in a Monday statement that unspecified challenges had led them to the decision to close. They had begun trying to sell the franchise a year earlier.
Its closure is certain to become part of a broader conversation about the obstacles to success some Yellowknife businesses face, ranging from security and safety concerns to the cost of operating.
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But while plenty of alternatives remain in Yellowknife – which offers many more fast food locations and downtown cafés to choose from – some people may be mourning A&W itself.
One of the two present owners, Randy Caines, said in 2010 he had taken over the franchise in the first place because his family had a fondness for A&W while he was growing up. (The owners have been approached for comment.)
If A&W is your thing and you live in Yellowknife, your options now become tricky to say the least.
By road, your closest A&W from January next year will be in High Level, Alberta, about a 715-km drive from Yellowknife.
An alternative is the Fort Nelson franchise, which is just under 1,000 km away. (This reporter’s first experience of an A&W after immigrating to Canada was at the Fort Nelson branch as part of a school trip, in which 40 children – most of them terrified of ordering in a restaurant – all lined up and ordered the same thing as the first kid.)
For most people, the loss of Yellowknife’s A&W probably means an airport will be the scene of their next Chubby Chicken. Among destinations you can reach direct from Yellowknife, the Calgary and Vancouver airports have at least one A&W, as does Toronto Pearson, though Edmonton’s airport doesn’t.
Downtown Whitehorse – sigh – also has an A&W, for what that’s worth.
