New ABC store coming to Buxton

A new ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) store is on the horizon for Buxton, to replace the current store located in the Osprey Shopping Center.

The original store, which opened in 1987 and was the first ABC store on Hatteras Island, has simply become too small for the island community, which has boomed over the past 35 years or so, while the store’s space has remained the same.

“We have well outgrown that space,” said Fields Scarborough, current Chairman of the Dare County ABC Board, and one of the original orchestrators of the island’s 1987 store. “There is still an ongoing issue with getting the store stocked properly, with inventory outages since the start of the pandemic, so we need the extra space.”

The new ABC store will be modeled after the current store in Kitty Hawk, and will be around 6,000 square feet in area. There will be a few differences from the Kitty Hawk design – the new Buxton store will not have a lightkeeper’s tower, due to maintenance concerns, and it will also have a regular roof as opposed to a flat roof, due to Hatteras Island’s routine brushes with high winds and heavy rains.

The ABC store will also be self-supportive, which means that tractor-trailer trucks will be able to make deliveries directly from Raleigh, instead of the store relying on smaller shipments from Dare County.

The new store will be located across N.C. Highway 12 from the current ABC store, next to the Dollar General in Buxton, but there’s still a lot to of work do before the expanded store can open its doors.

“We’re in the permitting stage right now, then [we’ll work on] renderings and the final store layout,” said Scarborough. “We’re hoping to have the building up and running by late spring or early summer of 2024.”

The Buxton ABC store serves all seven villages from Rodanthe to Hatteras, and currently, there are no plans to add a second store on Hatteras Island, but this is still a potential option down the road.

“We’ve looked at [a second ABC store] in the past, but by the time you staff and employ people, it wasn’t feasible. [The costs] got on the high end,” said Scarborough. “But it’s not out of the question – it would just be as to where we would put one in the future.”