PORT ANGELES — Brian Beaulaurier might want to say he deserves a break today from McDonald’s.
The international fast-food chain unexpectedly has delayed his plans to replace Port Angeles’ golden arches with a new $2.5 million eatery.
“It was a little bit of a late notice for me,” he said.
“They called me and said, ‘We’ve canceled your scrape-and-rebuild.’”
The term, he said, means razing the current 38-year-old structure at 1706 E. Front St. and building it anew.
The Port Angeles McDonald’s he owns had been handing out discount coupons with its orders — redeemable at the Sequim McDonald’s that Beaulaurier also owns, along with 14 more golden-arched restaurants from here to Belfair — as a consolation for the planned five-month closure of the fast-food franchise.
“It was a ‘Be our guest’ card letting a regular customer of the Port Angeles McDonald’s go to Sequim and get 10 percent off the order,” Beaulaurier said Thursday about the corporate delay he’d discovered about a week earlier.
“We were giving them out for five days. I was planning on handing out 10,000 of them but only handed out 500 to 1,000.”
All-new seating
The Port Angeles McDonald’s was slated to close Jan. 1, Beaulaurier said, “but the corporation called and delayed it,” citing a national slowdown in construction.
The McDonald’s corporation had sunk about $50,000 in architect’s costs and permitting fees into the project, he said.
Plans call to replace the restaurant, which Beaulaurier said would mark its 40th anniversary in 2016, with a new building housing all-new seating and equipment, plus an all-new play yard and side-by-side drive-thru lanes.
“It’s old and it’s tired,” said Beaulaurier, who lives near Hood Canal in Jefferson County, about the present building.
“We wanted to give Port Angeles a new, modern store. It’s a very important store to me. Port Angeles has always been very good to us.”
After the old restaurant is demolished, he said, building the new one will take about 14 weeks, with $1.5 million coming from his family-owned Laurier Enterprises that does business as Peninsula McDonald’s Restaurants, and about $1 million more coming from the Oak Brook, Ill.-based international company.
Expects short delay
Beaulaurier said he wasn’t worried that the delay would last long. The parent corporation could restart the project in “maybe a couple of months, maybe a year,” he said.
“It’s just been postponed. My guess is we’ll probably do it sometime in 2015. As soon as we know when it’s going to start back up, we’ll let everyone know.”
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com
