When you live in Northeast Wisconsin, you’re blessed to have Kwik Trip as your convenience store. I’ve lived in a lot of places, and you can keep your 7/11s, WaWa’s, Suncos and all that other stuff. Give me the convenience store where the hot food is better than many restaurants, and the checkout service is on a concierge level at times.

But the Walnut Kwik Trip near downtown Green Bay is another situation entirely. And now actions are being taken to reduce their hours.

A new sign says that the store will only operate from 5AM to 10PM daily. No reasons are cited, but I can speculate for you.

It’s because the Walnut Kwik Trip customers are the worst. A “Four Loko” at 10AM class, that stumbles around the area playing “Frogger” with the dangerous drivers in the area, as the drugs continue to take a toll in the neighborhood.

While you can take a 25 minute drive down to Appleton and see a Norman Rockwell painting playing out in a Kwik Trip on a Saturday afternoon, with little league kids buying ice cream, up at Walnut, you’ll find junkies locking themselves in the bathroom, and harassing customers in the back alley.

This isn’t the first time this Kwik Trip has been the source of drama either (story HERE). The customers have been causing problems in the neighborhood for years.

It’s not the employees. They’re doing their best. I’ve joked that they should get hazard pay as an incentive for working at such a problematic store. And I’ve written Kwik Trip about conditions at the Walnut Store and received only a friendly but unclear response in return. The truth is that if there isn’t a police officer camped out there, it always skews problematic.

Most of us will be fine. But it does make finding anything to eat in Downtown Green Bay even more problematic. The region is a food desert. Sadly, Kwik Trip may offer some of the few healthy solutions there are if you look in the cold case.

But now, as we approach the NFL draft, when the world will be watching us, we’re making food even harder to find in the urban core.

Just because we can’t behave at a convenience store.