Lower Hutt’s newest fast food restaurant is proving to be so popular with locals that they’ve had to call in the big dogs at traffic management to prevent long queues from flowing out onto the road.
The chicken-specific fast food store proved to be so popular that during its opening earlier this month customers were queueing as early as 3am to get some chicken.
However, Popeyes is no stranger to long queues and traffic issues as when they opened their first Kiwi store in Takanini in South Auckland earlier last year, cars packed out Great South Road from the store all the way to the motorway off-ramp.
The fast-food franchise had original plans to open up a store in Palmerston North but city councillor Mark Arnott believed it would cause major traffic delays.
“The corner of Tremaine Avenue and Rangitikei Street is one of our busiest intersections with an average daily traffic count of 18,699 vehicles and 10.41 percent of those are heavy vehicles.
“These two new businesses will have drive-thru entry on Tremaine Avenue with exit on Matipo Street, I can clearly see this causing congestion,” Arnott said.
Customers in the queue were asked why they wanted to wait in the long queue and let’s just say they were eager to get some famous Popeyes chicken.
“We’re big fried chicken fans, so we’re happy we found a new spot to go,” one customer said.
“It’s really good, the chicken’s nice and crunchy, it’s got a lot of sauce, lots of flavour, quite tasty actually,” another person said.
One happy customer even said it was better than the Colonels KFC.
“It is better than KFC, it’s not as oily as KFC is. It’s quite crunchy.”
Photo Credit: NZ Herald
