“Perfectly good” to be taken with plenty of salt and trans fats, of course. But the local Macs was recently torn down and replaced with a virtually identical store. Same floor plan. No additions or subtractions. Just remodeled a bit.
What might the justification be to spending, and losing since it has been closed since early summer, all that money on pretty much nothing?
Do you mean to say the entire building was torn down and constructed anew? Or did they just remodel the inside?
If the former, maybe the building had major structural problems and it was decided that putting a new one up would be cheaper than repairing it.
Fire brigade requirements? Asbestos problems? It was clearly cheaper to start from scratch than repair.
My guess without knowing the details is that it was an older building that had some structural limitations that made it non-compliant with current codes. My plant runs into it all the time. We just can’t do what we should do the way we should do it because our building is flawed and fixing it is too expensive.
The building was +/- 10 years old so there would be no asbestos problems. Complete teardown.
There may have been something invisible to you - significant water and mold damage, perhaps - that made it cheaper to raze and rebuild. But otherwise, there shouldn’t be any inherent reasons like asbestos or code non-compliance in such a young building.
Or, maybe something dumb happened like McD decides to move out and because of their unique architecture, declare the building must be removed, but change their mind after it’s too late.
Kentucky Fried Chicken used to be known for erasing all traces of itself if a store went out of business, back when there was more to their identity than a neon sign on a generic stucco building in the corner of a shopping mall, and they’d remove the entire building very quickly.
A very recent one was torn down and replaced here, by one of those retro Golden Arches fake-Fifties ones though, not the generic design they can slap up in a day.
This occurred with two other McDonalds in the Chicago area that I know about. one was in West Dundee, and the other was in Rockford (okay, maybe that’s stretching the Chicago area a bit, but whatever). They happened right around the same time–about a year and half, maybe two years ago.
I suspect that it’s something to do with a new business model, as the new stores had a decidedly more yuppie feel to them–kind of Panera-esque, if you get my meaning. It might just’ve been cheaper to tear them down than to tear everything out and remodel.
And one was razed to the ground and rebuilt here too. The interior is maybe a bit more roomy and the drivethrough lane is expanded, but other than that I don’t see the reason.
A Google search on “McDonald’s rebuild” suggests that McD’s went on a major remodling spree in 2005/2006.
It does have a certain poetic truth to it, doesn’t it? McDonald’s is the ultimate disposable meal, so serving it from disposable stores is just taking the idea to the Nth degree.
And for some reason, Pizza Hut never seemed to give a toss what happened to its distinctive 1970s buildings. Now that Pizza Hut is 99% delivery and tiny store fronts, I have fond childhood memories of actually eating there, and there is nothing sadder than a derelict actual “hut” building, and there are quite a few around. The one near my last house was all smashed glass, needles, and graffiti. Pizza Hut seems not to care about that - I’d have torn it down if I were them.
Even sadder is the occasional business that actually opens up in one…
“You’re really one of the most prestigious contract law firms in the state?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“But dude, you’re operating out of a Pizza Hut!”
A couple of blocks from me, Taco Bell decided to sell their existing building(to Starbuck’s) and move next door’s. So Starbuck’s is in the traditionally styled TB hut, and TB has the new model. Across the street the Bookstar cafe serves Starbuck’s coffee. Heh.
-Lil
They razed a Burger King here and are rebuilding to the same design as far as I can tell.
A nearby McDonalds was also bulldozed, but it’s still a vacant lot.
I suspect a roach or rat problem too bad to deal with unless dangerous amounts of poison were to be used.
Any chance of that, dropzone?
I had a loose tile in my bathroom. Turned out the tile was loose because a leak had partially dissolved the backing, which meant that all the tiles were on the verge of falling off, which meant replacing the entire wall, which led to replacing the bathtub, which led to. . . you get my drift. The final cost was about $10K.
If my contractor had offered to tear down the entire house and rebuild it I would have seriously considered it.
Around me it seems to be standard operating proceedure for McDonalds to tear down and rebuild stores in place of remodling an existing store.
I think it’s just a cost analyisis thing. They tear them down and have them back up and running in less then a month. Weigh that against inconviencing customers or paying guys to do the remodel third shift. Or maybe dealing with the boards of health trying to keep a passing store front while its underconstruction.
*I]/i] think somebody’s nephew is a construction contractor. 
The McDonalds near where I live was torn down and rebuilt as well, but, in that case, the building size and interior changed considerably.
It may not be a coincidence that Lombard, IL (dropzone’s location) is not very far from Oak Brook, home to McDonald’s world headquarters. Perhaps they’re experimenting with store designs.
In the accounting practices of major corporations some inexplicable things can happen. It could be a matter as simple as that there was money in the buget for capital improvements so some projects got moved forward. Since McDonalds are franchisees, the owners may have needed an immediate tax expense so they went ahead with a project that they had in mind for the future. Maybe the mortgage on the current building was running out and they wanted a total refinancing for accounting and tax reasons.
The nuances of business in America are very complex. We can speculate as to what happened but we may never really know. All you can bet on is that the people that made the decision believed, right or wrong, that in the long run they would come out ahead.