By now, you’ve probably heard that there’s a Five Guys Burgers and Fries in College Park, and chances are, you’ve been there once or twice or even 10 times. It isn’t open late enough to take advantage of the post-last-call crowds, but Five Guys seems to be doing pretty well – well enough, at least, to justify opening a new location five minutes away from the store it opened earlier this year in Hyattsville. But is it here to stay? I wouldn’t be so sure.
You could say that any place that specializes in cheap, junky food is destined to be a big success on Route 1. But try telling that to the Fractured Prune, Curry Express, JD’s Roadhouse, Tasti D-Lite, Eats (extra credit to anyone who remembers it, let alone actually ate there), Moe’s Southwest Grill (which had two locations – one at Route 1 and Hartwick Road and another next to IKEA) and, of course, our beloved Wawa, which was a convenience store, but managed to be cheapest and junkiest of all. Every single one of these establishments opened its doors sometime within the past four years, thinking it’d get lines out the door like Chipotle does now, only to fail miserably.
Take Fractured Prune, for instance. It started out as a seasonal business, open only during the summer on the boardwalk in Ocean City. By default, all businesses in College Park operate seasonally. But a donut shop in Ocean City will make much more money in three months than a donut shop in College Park will in nine, merely because it’ll get more traffic from beachgoers. Not to mention, of course, that college students in school tend to be very frugal, but those same students – along with their friends and significant others and parents and siblings – will gladly spend money while on vacation.
On the other hand, seasonal traffic may not be as big of an issue in College Park, where we’ve got 26,000 year-round residents and hundreds of thousands more in surrounding towns who could eat here when school’s out. And they do, to an extent. If you go to school here, don’t have a car and don’t feel like exploring, Route 1 is about the only place where you can spend money. But if you’re from here, you’ve got choices – malls in Hyattsville and Greenbelt and much nicer malls in Silver Spring and Bethesda, and so on. There you can have your burger and go buy a television or a pair of shoes, or just people-watch. In downtown College Park, you can have a burger, mosey on over to Cornerstone and drink away the rest of your day. But for the majority of post-graduate individuals, this is no way to live.
When Five Guys first opened, it had one location in Arlington, Va., and it made that city a destination for burger fans. That’s what College Park needs – a destination that isn’t a football game. If we want to ensure the economic health of our local businesses, we need to diversify. That doesn’t just mean bringing back Curry Express. It means drawing businesses that sell televisions or shoes or something you can’t find anywhere else, so when the university crowd goes on break, they can draw customers and compete against the region’s other shopping destinations.
So is Five Guys here to stay? Maybe, but only if all the other vacancies in College Park aren’t filled by more burger joints.
Dan Reed is a senior architecture and English major. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.
