Three Alaska Dairy Queen locations are closing as costs hit record highs due to Dan Sullivan’s price-hiking agenda that has spiked gas, grocery, and healthcare costs.

As Alaska small business owners struggle to stay afloat amid Sullivan’s price hikes, three of the four remaining Dairy Queens in Alaska suddenly closed last week as experts cite the high costs of transporting food and materials to Alaska as a significant challenge.  

“It’s a bad day for ice cream fans across the state as Dan Sullivan has done nothing to address the affordability crisis he’s created for Alaskans, including Alaska business owners,” said Alaska Democratic Party Chair Eric Croft. “Every Alaska business owner watching their margins shrink or facing closure can thank Dan Sullivan. He’s cashed in at every turn while leaving Alaskans footing the bill.”

Anchorage Daily News: 3 Alaska Dairy Queens abruptly close, leaving one in Soldotna

• Three of the four remaining Dairy Queens in Alaska suddenly closed this week without explanation, leaving just one in Soldotna that’s been locally owned for decades.

• “The franchise owner of the Anchorage, Wasilla and Palmer locations recently closed them,” an official with the Dairy Queen chain said in an email Thursday, without providing the owner’s name.

• The closures mark a sharp turnaround for those shops from nearly 20 years ago, when the success of the franchise in Alaska was marked by record sales at the opening of the Tudor Road location in Anchorage.

• “It’s sad to see that they’re closing down,” said Greg Todd, who launched that Tudor Road Dairy Queen and also once owned four others in Alaska, two in Anchorage and the ones in Palmer and Wasilla that just closed. […] “Every Dairy Queen sales record they had, we broke in the first month” at the Tudor location, he said. “We flew soft-serve up on Alaska Airlines because we’re going through it so fast. It was just an amazing success.”

• Pete Ischi, who owns the Soldotna Dairy Queen with his former wife Val Ischi, said the closure of the other Dairy Queens is “shocking.”

• It happened Tuesday, he said.

• “We’re sorry to hear that,” he said.

• The Ischi family independently owns the Dairy Queen in Soldotna and they don’t have business ties to the locations that closed, he said.

• The closures appear unrelated to anything happening with the chain internationally, which is doing well, he said.

• Operating a Dairy Queen in Alaska can be challenging, with the huge costs of transporting food to the state, Pete Ischi said.

• “We pay freight to get stuff up to Alaska, where Oregon, Washington, you know, they’ve got the distributors an hour away,” he said.

• “You’ve got to be really diligent, I think, to survive,” he said.