Rumors are circulating that the Walgreens in Ellenville, which closed last month as part of a drastic shrinkage of the pharmacy industry, will be replaced with a fast-food restaurant. The believe is that the location on Route 209, and wide parking lot, are ideal for another grab-and-go eatery.

We come not to confirm these rumors, nor to deny them, but instead to place an order.

Journal staff have been informally polling each other about what fast-food franchises we would be most, and least, excited to see open.

What became apparent was that nobody was particularly interested in cheeseburgers. There is a McDonald’s right across the road, and a Burger King that couldn’t survive here. The protein of choice among us was, without question, chicken.

Popeyes had some appeal. The Louisiana-based franchise offers chicken by the box – strips, wings, sandwiches, and general hunks of meat fried as deep as it gets. You might remember, just before Covid, Popeyes introduced a spicy chicken sandwich that for some reason had the country entranced. We never quite understood the lines-around-the-block hype, but it was a pretty good sandwich.

There’s also Chick-fil-A, which is as delicious as it is hard to type properly. Just before the pandemic – and we do not know why all fast-food chicken news seems to take place at that moment – while Popeyes made headlines with their spicy sandwich, Chick-fil-A was in the news for another reason, that actually might be pretty useful information for the Route 209 building.

Chick-fil-A franchising, an article by The Hustle reported, was remarkably inexpensive. While it could cost up to $3 million to franchise a Taco Bell, and Wendy’s reportedly doesn’t even look at your application unless you have $5 million in the bank and $2 million in liquid assets, it costs just $10,000 to open a Chick-fil-A.

The way it usually works is a franchisee pays a licensing fee to use the name and recipes, buys a building, and pays to set it up. Those franchising fees range from $30k for Taco Bell to, somewhat inexplicably, $50k for Jack in the Box. Chik-fil-A works differently. You pay them 10 grand, and the company, not the franchisee, pays for the building, the equipment, and all the rest.

In exchange, Chick-fil-A takes a much larger piece of your earnings – 15 percent compared to Wendy’s 4 percent.

It would be interesting to see if their lower barrier to entry means somebody other than a big developer can scoop up that location and turn it into a locally-owned franchise.

Ultimately, for us in the Journal, the winner of the Chicken Wars is Wendy’s. They’re a tiny hamburgers-and-fry chain (the burgers are tiny, not the chain) that pivoted to chicken sometime after Y2K, and it has made them stand out – not quite McDonald’s but able to compete, not quite Chick-fil-A but able to compete.

Maybe it’s because they’re older and we have some subconscious brand loyalty, maybe it’s because they offer a whole bunch of other foods, maybe it’s because they have those huge soda machines where you can click through screen after screen finding more flavors of root beer than you knew existed.

So, if the Journal had its say, it would be a Wendys taking the place of the Walgreen’s.

Maybe it’s because their portions are smaller, and we feel less awful an hour later.

What do you want to see open? Let us know.