Mahomes wasn’t at Whataburger’s drive-thru, so why go nuts for what’s just a burger?
Did people think Patrick Mahomes himself was handing out burgers in Lee’s Summit on Monday?
The line of cars along North East Douglas Road where the new Whataburger fast food chain opened its first Kansas City area restaurant resembled traffic backed up at Interstate 70 and Blue Ridge Cutoff before a Sunday afternoon Chiefs game.
“A bit extreme,” is what a Whataburger worker who travels the country opening restaurant franchises had to say about the scene. He was smiling when he said it. Cha ching!
But “a bit extreme” is right. Because we are just talking about your basic grilled beef patty slapped between a 5-inch bun. And no, Mahomes was not working the drive-thru.
So what’s the rush? We’ve got arguably the best barbecue going and Town Topic burgers have been around for decades.
Maybe the people who waited hours for the Whataburger just had a bad case of FOMO. But fear of missing out on what, exactly? “To be one of the first to get it in Kansas City,” one customer said.
Mahomes and his group KMO Burger plan 29 more of the restaurants for the region from Wichita to St. Joseph. The Lee’s Summit one is just the first to open. So there’s plenty of time to grab one of those Whataburger Mushroom Swiss burgers — a whopping 1,110 calories and 70 grams of fat.
Yes there’s been a lot of hype around the Texas-based restaurant opening here. Mahomes, who grew up in Texas, loves Whataburger and Kansas City loves Mahomes and anything he loves.
(He doesn’t love the tomahawk chop. How about we line up behind him to stop that?)
In three hours, the Whataburger had sold more than 800 burgers. The first person was in line at 6 a.m. and the place didn’t open until 11 a.m. Gady Villescas drove his family from Kansas City, Kansas, and waited nearly two hours for a sack of burgers that cost him $45.
Villescas laughed at himself for spending “a whole day” snagging a bag of sandwiches. His sister, Karen Guzmen, let her kids be the judge. Normally, she said, they don’t eat a whole burger. They finished these off, Guzmen said. “But I don’t know if it was that the burgers were that good or all the excitement, or if they were just really hungry after waiting so long.”