Wawa And Hobby Lobby Were Announced On The Same Day. Only One Has Opened.

Drive Alexandria Pike past Meijer this week and you will pass a stretch of pavement that tells two different stories depending on which pad you are looking at. On one side, cars stack up in a drive-thru lane outside a McAlister's Deli that has been open since July. A few hundred feet away, a lot marked for Wawa still shows no framing and no sign, a business Cold Spring residents have been reading about since the summer of 2024.

Here is the part that catches people off guard once they check the dates. Wawa and Hobby Lobby were named in the exact same Facebook post from Cold Spring's mayor, on the exact same day. Hobby Lobby has been open since March. Wawa still has no groundbreaking and no announced opening.

That gap is the real story of Cold Spring Pointe this fall. It is not a simple tally of what has opened and what hasn't. It is a lesson in how little the order of announcements predicts the order of arrivals, and residents who have been tracking this corridor since the first renderings went up are starting to notice.

The Announcement That Didn't Determine Anything

On June 25, 2024, Cold Spring Mayor Angelo Penque posted an update naming the businesses expected at the new development across from Meijer. Hobby Lobby, Marshalls, 5 Digits, and Five Below were listed as "anticipated." Wawa and Outback Steakhouse were named the same day as having "indicated interest," language the mayor used to distinguish them from signed tenants. Three weeks later, on July 19, 2024, the city added two more names to the list: Chase Bank and Chick-fil-A.

Fast forward two years and the group that got the earliest, most confident language has split into two very different outcomes. Hobby Lobby's 55,000-square-foot store opened March 20, 2026, becoming the chain's 23rd location in Kentucky. Marshalls opened April 9. Both came from the "anticipated" half of that first post.

Wawa and Outback Steakhouse, the two names given the softer "indicated interest" label that same day, tell the opposite story. Wawa has no groundbreaking and no announced opening as of this writing. Outback hasn't appeared in a single zoning filing or city update since that original mention, which suggests whatever interest existed in 2024 didn't survive contact with a lease. Chase Bank and Chick-fil-A, added three weeks after the first group, took until January 14, 2026, nearly eighteen months later, just to get Chick-fil-A's site plan through zoning. Chase Bank still has no construction news at all.

The Restaurants Nobody Announced in 2024

While Wawa and Chase sat without a construction timeline, a different set of businesses that were never named in either 2024 post started moving. At that same January 14, 2026 meeting where Chick-fil-A finally got approved, the Cold Spring Planning and Zoning Commission also approved Gold Star Chili and Seven Brew Coffee, neither of which had appeared in any prior city announcement. A McAlister's Deli and a First Watch, also absent from the 2024 lists, had already been approved for a separate outlot on the same site.

McAlister's opened first, on July 19, 2026, with a ribbon-cutting hosted by the Cold Spring Chamber of Commerce. That means a restaurant nobody had heard of in 2024 beat Wawa, Chase Bank, and even Chick-fil-A to an actual opening day.

Gold Star broke ground June 3, 2026, with company president Roger David and Mayor Penque on hand for a ceremonial spice-packet dedication at the foundation. The company's own announcement put construction completion at fall 2026, meaning a restaurant that didn't exist on anyone's radar in January now expects to open within the same season as Chick-fil-A, a name residents had been waiting on for a year and a half longer.

Chick-fil-A's civil engineer told the planning commission the restaurant was aiming for a fall opening, with a six-to-eight-month build once construction started in spring. That puts its likely opening in roughly the same window as Gold Star, despite an eighteen-month head start in public awareness that Gold Star never had.

Seven Brew is the wild card. The chain typically moves from a delivered prefabricated building to an open drive-thru in about 12 weeks, a pace referenced during the same January meeting. If Cold Spring's location follows that pattern, it could beat both Chick-fil-A and Gold Star to a ribbon cutting despite being approved at the same meeting and never having been publicly named before that night.

Two Developments, One Errand Run

Part of what makes this confusing to track is that Cold Spring Pointe and Cold Spring Town Center are technically two separate projects sitting almost on top of each other. Cold Spring Pointe, the 52-acre development anchored by Publix, Hobby Lobby, and Marshalls, sits in the 5400 block of Alexandria Pike. Cold Spring Town Center, home to McAlister's Deli, Gold Star, and Seven Brew, sits about a mile south near the Alexandria Pike and Industrial Road intersection, in the 3700 and 3800 blocks. The Town Center project also includes medical offices for Cincinnati Children's and The Christ Hospital Health Network set back from the road.

To anyone actually driving the corridor, the distinction barely registers. It reads as one continuous stretch of new construction between Meijer and Industrial Road, which is probably why most local coverage treats it that way too.

Here's where things actually stand along that stretch as of this September:

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you have been holding off on a grocery run assuming Wawa or Chase would be open by now, stop waiting on them specifically. Everything you actually need for a Saturday errand loop, groceries at Publix, a Hobby Lobby run for fall decor, off-price shopping at Marshalls, and now lunch at McAlister's, is already open and has been for weeks in some cases.

What's worth watching is the back half of the year. If Gold Star and Chick-fil-A both land on their fall targets, and if Seven Brew's typical build speed holds, this corridor could add three more open businesses before the holidays, none of which existed in any public announcement before January of this year. That's not a knock on Wawa or Chase specifically. Convenience store chains and banks often move on internal real estate timelines that have nothing to do with local zoning speed. But it does mean the two names that generated the most local buzz back in the summer of 2024 aren't the ones actually shaping daily life on Alexandria Pike right now, and by the time they do open, several businesses nobody had heard of two years ago will already have a season of regulars.

For a corridor that spent most of 2024 and 2025 as a construction site, that's a meaningful shift. The pace of what opens next says less about which businesses residents were most excited for and more about which ones could actually get a building up fastest, and that's a pattern worth remembering the next time a new sign goes up on an empty lot.

If you're watching how a stretch of new construction like this changes daily life in Cold Spring, and want to talk about what it might mean for your own next move here, Amy Houston is always happy to have that conversation. Let's Connect.