Sept. 23, 2021

When a new Chick-fil-A opens, there always are going to be early birds.

In Sioux Falls, that meant arriving hours before the sun rose today for the opening of the state’s first stand-alone location.

Photo via facebook.com/CFAEmpirePlace

By the time breakfast chicken sandwiches were ready to be ordered — 6:30 a.m. — managers said there were nearly 60 cars waiting.

And the lines just kept forming throughout the day. The average wait time once an order was placed was four to five minutes, managers said. Several diners who went into the restaurant over lunch reported waiting less than 10 minutes in line.

“Traffic is very, very good,” said Raquel Blount, vice president of commercial real estate for of Lloyd Cos., who put the Chick-fil-A deal together at Empire Place. “Our tenants in the project are very excited about getting the lineup all open and everybody operating.”

Traffic management was organized, she added.

“Their team and everybody involved has been very cooperative, understanding and respecting traffic flow,” she said. “Don’t avoid the area, because they’re very much on top of it and making sure things are flowing well.”

While the national chicken restaurant chain has been a request from Sioux Falls diners for years, Chick-fil-A was willing to wait.

“A lot of times, we have nationals that want to come to the market, but if they don’t have the perfect location, they wait,” Blount said. “We’ve been able to secure some phenomenal national tenants that have been waiting for quite some time to find the right location in the market.”

But once they arrive in Sioux Falls, retailers tend to find the market responds in a big way.

Sioux Falls smashed the previous opening weekend record for Crumbl Cookies, another tenant at Empire Place, earlier this summer.

The cookie chain’s previous record was selling 7,000 cookies in an opening weekend.

“And I’m told their first three days here at Empire Place was 22,000, so that’s fantastic,” Blount said.

“We hear it all the time in our market when the must-have concepts come.”

Buff City Soap will be the next new national retailer to open at Empire Place.

“It’s a very interactive, fun concept. People are going to absolutely love it,” Blount said.