Three of the four remaining Dairy Queens in Alaska suddenly closed this week without explanation, leaving just one in Soldotna that’s been locally owned for decades.
“The franchise owner of the Anchorage, Wasilla and Palmer locations recently closed them,” an official with the Dairy Queen chain said in an email Thursday, without providing the owner’s name.
The closures mark a sharp turnaround for those shops from nearly 20 years ago, when the success of the franchise in Alaska was marked by record sales at the opening of the Tudor Road location in Anchorage.
“It’s sad to see that they’re closing down,” said Greg Todd, who launched that Tudor Road Dairy Queen and also once owned four others in Alaska, two in Anchorage and the ones in Palmer and Wasilla that just closed.
Todd said he sold the five Dairy Queens on Valentine’s Day in 2017, to retire and spend time with his wife and co-owner, Kathleen.
The Tudor store did especially well, he said Thursday.
“Every Dairy Queen sales record they had, we broke in the first month” at the Tudor location, he said. “We flew soft-serve up on Alaska Airlines because we’re going through it so fast. It was just an amazing success.”
The Tudor location property is owned by Spirit Realty L P Rego Restaurant Group, Anchorage municipal records show. It’s unclear if the company also owned the franchise, or only the restaurant building itself.
An official with Rego Restaurant Group, which is based in Colorado, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Todd, who now lives outside Alaska, said he doesn’t know why the three Dairy Queens in Alaska closed.
Pete Ischi, who owns the Soldotna Dairy Queen with his former wife Val Ischi, said the closure of the other Dairy Queens is “shocking.”
It happened Tuesday, he said.
“We’re sorry to hear that,” he said.
“We had been approached by corporate about possibly buying one or all three of the stores, but we elected not to do it because it’s just too far away for us to operate effectively,” Pete Ischi said.
The Ischi family independently owns the Dairy Queen in Soldotna and they don’t have business ties to the locations that closed, he said.
The closures appear unrelated to anything happing with the chain internationally, which is doing well, he said.
The chain consists of more than 7,800 locations in over 20 countries. It’s owned by Berkshire Hathaway and is growing globally.
Operating a Dairy Queen in Alaska can be challenging, with the huge costs of transporting food to the state, Pete Ischi said.
“We pay freight to get stuff up to Alaska, where Oregon, Washington, you know, they’ve got the distributors an hour away,” he said.
“You’ve got to be really diligent, I think, to survive,” he said.
Sales at the Soldotna DQ are going strong and the family has no plans to close it, he said.
They’ve owned it more than 40 years.
Phil Ischi, their son, is the manager there and he’s buying it, he said.
“We do not even have a remote thought of closing the Soldotna Dairy Queen,” Pete Ischi said.
Dairy Queen, in its statement, said it’s “seeking new franchise owners in Alaska. Interested parties can learn more at www.dairyqueenfranchising.com.”
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