Outback Steakhouse

[TheFugitive]

Though if they do a decent job (which they must if they have stayed around this long), they should get a boost in business - not too many people outside of true city blocks have a restaurant in potential walking distance from their homes :)

You're right, they deserve a lot of credit for hanging in there all alone in an empty lot for all those years. One thing that may have helped them is that the next-closest Outback location was destroyed by a flood. I would actually be quite happy if an Outback Steakhouse was within walking distance of my house.

[jconsolmagno]

The Outback location in Robinson Township, PA west of Pittsburgh is in a very strange location.

It's away from the beaten path of Robinson Town Center where most of the chain restaurants are located.  It is up on top of a hill all by itself.  When it opened this location was in the parking lot of a Super Kmart store that filled the entire hilltop and could be easily seen as you were driving to the airport.

Kmart then hit the iceberg and began closing stores.  At the same time the shale fracking boom was taking off in Pennsylvania and turning the state into an energy dynamo.  Chevron negotiated a deal with Kmart to buy that location, demolish it and build a regional headquarters on the site.

This transaction occurred and the relatively new Kmart was torn down. This left Outback all by itself at the edge of a huge empty lot.  Before Chevron was able to get going on construction of this new HQ there was a political change (i.e. Pennsylvania elected a Governor who wanted to hike taxes on the fracking industry).  Chevron did not like this so they canceled their plans to build that facility and left the state.

So the Outback just trundled along all by its lonesome up on top of that hill until the property was sold and rezoned residential.  So there is a new neighborhood of newly constructed houses going up all around this Outback Steakhouse, the only commercial property in the vicinity. 

Walk out the door of Outback and find yourself in a residential neighborhood.  Weird.

Always wondered about this location, thanks for the backstory.

[TheFugitive]

A former colleague of mine from Hills had been one of the managers at this hilltop Super Kmart location.  He told me that once he had to call the cops on Christmas Eve because last-minute shoppers refused to leave the store at closing time.