Dead Salad Chain to Be Auctioned Off to Two Coffee Shops; The Parking Lots, It Turns Out, Were Always the Business

PHOENIX — A bankrupt drive-thru salad chain is about to be auctioned off, in front of a federal judge, to two coffee companies that have, so far as anyone on this desk can determine, no particular love of lettuce, a development that has the region’s food scene in a state of, by the account of the people who used to work there, “honest confusion, and a little bit of hope.”

The chain, which for the last several years has been making salads in a drive-thru with the kind of urgency that, in the food world, is a term of endearment and, in this case, a description, has entered bankruptcy and, per the court filings, selected a $105 million offer from one of the coffee chains to buy roughly 65 of its locations, a sum that works out to more than two million dollars a salad parking lot, which is, in the language of the people who have priced salad parking lots, “a number that makes you stop and look at the parking lot again.”

A rival coffee chain, which was not selected, has filed an objection, and a federal bankruptcy judge has approved a targeted auction between the two, which means that, at the hearing, two coffee companies will be in the same room, bidding on the same empty salad buildings, for the express purpose of figuring out which of them gets to put a coffee cup in a place that, until very recently, put a romaine heart in a to-go box. The other roughly hundred leases are going to a broader sale, with a hearing set for early September, which is the industry’s term for “the salad is done and the real estate is the story now.”

The local reaction has been, in the way of locals, immediate and specific. A food-truck operator who has been parked across the street from one of the shuttered locations for the better part of a year says the coffee bid is, in his words, “finally, somebody who gets it,” and by “it” he means the lane, and by “gets it” he means that a drive-thru that can move a car through a window in forty-five seconds is, regardless of what the window is for, a piece of infrastructure that does not come cheap, and that the salad was, in his accounting, never really the point.

The question that has not been answered, and that the people in the industry are asking with the particular intensity of people who have been waiting on an answer for a while, is what happens to the equipment. The salad cases, the wash stations, the crouton bins, the whole apparatus of a drive-thru that was, until last month, a salad operation, do not, as a matter of logistics, convert to coffee overnight, and the two bidders, in the filings, have not, as of this morning, described a plan for the crouton bins, which is, in the language of the people who have bought restaurant equipment before, either a sign that the plan is good, or a sign that the plan is “we’ll figure it out,” and the two, in the experience of everyone who has been in a walk-in refrigerator at 2 a.m., are usually the same sentence.

At press time, the auction had not been held, the coffee had not been poured, the salad cases had not, so far as anyone could tell, been moved, and a dog that has, for the last several weeks, been eating the romaine that went over the wall behind one of the locations had, by the account of the person who feeds it, “no comment, and no position on the outcome of the bidding.”