CHAPEL HILL -- The opening of the newest Krispy Kreme store has once again shown the lengths North Carolinians will go to get their hands on the hot, golden rings.
More than 150 people clamored for the first batch off the racks, waiting outside 157 E. Franklin St. in the dark until the "Hot Now" light went on at 6 a.m. Wednesday.
UNC-Chapel Hill sophomore Matthew Trexler camped out for 19 hours - starting at 11 a.m. Tuesday - to claim his one dozen Krispy Kremes every week for a year, as the store's first customer.
"Every place I lived there was a Krispy Kreme, and since coming to Chapel Hill there hasn't been one, and I really missed it a lot," said Trexler, who downed a Red Bull energy drink before his doughnut-induced moment of glory.
The biology major from Raleigh sacrificed sleep and arranged for his roommate to take his place in line for two hours so he didn't have to miss a class on the first day. The next 99 customers in line received a dozen free doughnuts every month for a year and a Carolina blue Krispy Kreme T-shirt.
"My roommate [is] also getting a dozen a month, so between us it will be five dozen a month," Trexler said. "I'm definitely going to make a lot of new friends."
N.C. Speaker of the House Joe Hackney and Tar Heel women's basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell also came out to show their doughnut love.
"I'm a big fan of Krispy Kreme," Hatchell said. "I love it so much that when it went public in the late '90s, the first hour it went public I bought 6,000 shares of stock in Krispy Kreme, and I still have it."
Krispy Kreme doughnuts sold at the Chapel Hill location are glazed and heated on site, but the rings come from the Raleigh shop on Person Street. About 1,000 dozen glazed doughnuts made the trip for the opening.
Most of those waiting were students, but others got in on the action. Jeff Nieman, an assistant district attorney, picked up six dozen Krispy Kremes for the traffic violators he would prosecute that day.
"I thought, well, people line up kind of like they do here at 7 in the morning, so I'll come there, and it will be something happy for them," he said. "People are usually not all that happy to be there."
Getting a business through Chapel Hill's tough review process can be an uphill climb. But things apparently go down a lot more smoothly when you're talking about melt-in-your-mouth, glazed goodness. It took the North Carolina doughnut franchise only 32 days to get town approval to open the new store.
"This has been an example of a new business opening and a town working together to make sure it happens quickly and efficiently and in a way that that really is unprecedented," Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said. "Those of you who have been in Chapel Hill for a long time know that is not a common story for opening businesses. ... But that is the way we want to start doing business."
