The small city of Troy, New York isn’t hurting for fast food: There’s a Sonic Drive-In, a Starbucks, a Friendly’s, a McDonald’s, a Popeyes, a Dunkin’, a Burger King, a Subway, a couple of Stewart’s, and a handful of pizza and sub shops. With all those options, most people might not even think about the fact that neither Troy nor its neighboring city of Albany have a single freestanding Chick-fil-A.
Should you find yourself in the greater Troy area with a craving for nothing but a Chick-fil-A sandwich and of course, the good luck to feel this way on any day but Sunday, you’ll have to travel 68 miles to the Chick-fil-A in Chicopee, Massachusetts or 76 miles to the one in Enfield, Connecticut, and driving either of those distances for fast food seems ill-advised.
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Craving Chick-fil-A chicken just that badly but not wanting to travel quite so far, a group of students from Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute figured out a pricey but successful Chick-fil-A hack, as reported by ABC7. The first step was to buy a plane ticket to Florida.
While the area lacks standalone Chick-fil-A locations, the Albany airport has a mini Chick-fil-A behind the TSA checkpoint. To get past that, members of RPI’s cross country/track and field team scrounged up $5.50 each to buy a plane ticket for RPI senior Vincent Putrino. With the $98 ticket to Fort Lauderdale, Florida—the cheapest the team could find—Putrino headed to Chick-fil-A, where he justified the whole ordeal by ordering $227.28 worth of food, including 15 sandwiches, 15 orders of fries, and exactly 156 chicken nuggets. With that in tow, he left the airport and fed his friends.
All of this, of course, seems a little much for a plain chicken sandwich served with an unfortunate side of homophobia. After all, Popeyes is literally right there.
