A pre-dawn line of roughly 40 patrons greeted the new store, including high schoolers in matching Kwik Trip attire
The morning of April 16 was still dark when the first cars pulled into E4905 U.S. Highway 14, more than half an hour before the lights came on. By 5 a.m., a line of roughly 40 people had gathered along the renovated facade of the former Riteway Plaza Shell — high schoolers in matching Kwik Trip attire, parents with kids in tow, commuters on their way to a shift. A cheer went up as the doors swung open.
Inside, Monica Wheaton, store leader of the new Spring Green Kwik Trip, held the door for each one. By the time Valley Sentinel caught up with her later that morning, she was wiping away happy tears.
“We did not expect it at all,” Wheaton said. “I’ve opened another store, the one in Richland Center, the one by the bowling alley. It wasn’t even like this.”
Wheaton would know. With 19 years at Kwik Trip and — by her own laughing count — more stores under her belt than she can readily name, she said the Spring Green debut stood apart. Her district leader, a Kwik Trip veteran who oversaw more than 30 stores, told her the same thing. Every grand opening looks a little different, but this one looked like nothing either of them had seen before.
“This is a very special moment, very unique,” Wheaton said.
The morning’s enthusiasm caught the kitchen off guard. By the time most of the early crowd had filtered through, the hot spot — Kwik Trip’s prepared-food case — had been picked clean. Three breakfast sandwiches in, the supply was gone. “I guess we should have had all the hot spots completely full,” Wheaton said.
The opening represents the culmination of years of local anticipation. For three consecutive years, bringing a Kwik Trip to the area placed first in Valley Sentinel‘s Best of the River Valley reader poll for “Biggest Thing We Should Make Happen Soon,” before shifting to second place behind affordable housing in 2025.
The store occupies a building with an unusual local provenance. The station was originally designed in the 1990s by Charles Montooth of Taliesin Architects, a detail verified by local Frank Lloyd Wright historian and expert on Taliesin, Keiran Murphy. Montooth was an apprentice of Wright’s.
Rather than razing the Montooth design for a standard corporate blueprint, Kwik Trip opted for adaptive reuse.
“The existing building fit our needs for the store, so we didn’t see a need to tear it down and build a brand new one on site,” Kwik Trip spokesperson Ben Leibl said.
Inside, the layout has been flipped — bathrooms moved to the back left of the entrance, service counters shifted to the front right. The long, low Montooth-era profile of the exterior remains largely intact, now framed by Kwik Trip’s bright red, lit signage.
For Wheaton, the building has been almost beside the point compared to the people walking through it. She described the morning’s atmosphere as one of pride — from her own crew, and from the line at the door. She made a point of singling out the high schoolers in coordinated Kwik Trip gear, some in what looked like matching pajamas, others in hats.
“I noticed a lot of them were wearing Kwik Trip attire,” she said. “I thought that was really cute.”
In a Facebook post the evening of the opening, Wheaton wrote that the day wouldn’t have been possible without her coworkers and the leadership in her district. Some of those team members had been with her at openings across the region; for them, too, she said, this one felt different.
Kwik Trip #1915 is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A formal ribbon cutting is scheduled for 10 a.m. April 22.
“We’re just getting started,” Wheaton wrote the night of the opening. “I look forward to seeing everyone again tomorrow, in the days ahead, and serving not only our neighbors but everyone passing through.”
