THOMASVILLE ALABAMA
33311 Hwy 43 N
Thomasville AL 36784 |
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| This restaurant is owned and operated by an independent franchisee of the McDonald's Corporation. | |
June 11, 2009
McDonald's reopens Thursday after fire
Clarke County McDonald's restaurant operator Bob Orwig announced the re-opening of the Thomasville McDonald's restaurant this week.
The restaurant reopens today at 10 a.m. with a brand new building but the same menu.
The Thomasville McDonald's was destroyed by fire on Oct. 28. The burned out building sat untouched for several months while Bob and Michelle Orwig worked with McDonald's corporate representatives to sort out the details of rebuilding the restaurant.
"While contructing the building, and especially during the final phase, customers have been driving over traffic cones and through barricades to get into the parking lot," Bob Orwig said.
The new restaurant features wi-fi connectivity, video-game stations and a double drivethrough. Michelle Orwig explained that a picture of the car is overlayed onto the order on the screens so drive through employees know which order goes with which car.
The old restaurant was cleaned off the site and a completely new building was constructed. The construction took 89 days. The restaurant will employ about 80 people.
The Orwigs have owned the restaurant since 2000, before that, Bob Orwig was a McDonald's manager and supervisor in Nashville, Tenn. and Pennsylvania.
An Indiana native, Orwig began working in the food business as a small boy with his father and Burger Chef in 1965. Later as a teen, he worked as a grill cook during the summers with his father at Ponderosa Steak House in Indianapolis, IN. In the early 1990s, the Orwigs moved to Pennsylvania to helped his father run a McDonald's.
"There was a time when I had some success at acting, so I went down that career path," Orwig said. He was in several movies, commercials and television programs, including the Academy Award winning movie "Platoon."
"You could say I tried very hard to get out of the food business because it is a hard way to make a living," he said. "But once Michelle and I started our family and began to look at our options, we realized that this could be something we could work together in and something we could be proud of."
As reported by "The Thomasville Times"
| McDonald's is Coca-Cola's largest customer in the world, serving five billion Coca-Cola products worldwide each year. |
