Chick-fil-A and its drive-thru scofflaws may have finally met their match: San Roque resident Ronda Hobbs, who has time on her hands and a bee in her bonnet. “Watch out for retired ladies,” she said.
Hobbs never liked Chick-fil-A. Not because of their fatty fast food ― she worked for many years as a dietician for the Department of Veteran Affairs ― but because of the national chain’s history of donating to anti-LGBTQ+ charities. “I really detested them for their social positions,” she told me. Though the company itself has reportedly cut back on such giving, its billionaire owner was recently outed as a major contributor to an effort to derail the Equality Act, pending legislation that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from discrimination at a federal level.
What spurred Hobbs to local action, however, was watching the upper State Street restaurant’s overcrowded drive-thru line spill constantly and precariously into the road, a public safety issue that has persisted for the better part of the decade, unabated, with no apparent consequences for either the culprit drivers or their fried-chicken-flinging enablers. “The idea of a big company coming into our community and using the main street of our city as a private parking lot is not acceptable,” she said.