Willowbrook's Donut Shop Opened in Six Weeks. Its Grocery Store Is Still Waiting a Year Later.

Drive Kingery Highway through Willowbrook on any weekday afternoon and you'll pass two stories happening at once. On one side of Route 83, a donut shop opened, got busy, and settled into being exactly what a donut shop is supposed to be. On the other side, a vacant lot that used to be a bowling alley is still just a vacant lot, more than a year after the village announced what was coming.

Both projects started in the same season. Only one of them is finished.

The Corner Everyone's Watching

The empty parcel is at 735 Plainfield Road, just east of Route 83. From 1963 to 2016, it was Willowbrook Bowl, the kind of place where, as Mayor Frank Trilla put it when the village announced its plans, generations of local families spent their evenings. The lanes closed in 2016 and the building sat there for the better part of a decade, doing nothing.

In August 2025, the village bought the site outright for $5.1 million, financed through a loan from Hinsdale Bank & Trust. In April 2026, Willowbrook announced that Trader Joe's planned to redevelop the property. That's genuinely good news for a village that doesn't have one of its own yet, even though the chain already operates over 600 locations nationally, including 23 in Illinois, in towns like La Grange, Naperville, and Downers Grove. Willowbrook has been the gap on that map.

Here's where it gets less tidy. As of a Patch report from September 16, 2026, the village still has no confirmed opening date. Village administrator Sean Halloran told Patch the village has no information to share yet on timing, though he said residents would hear more when there's something to say. A Trader Joe's spokesperson declined to offer a timeline as well.

So the site that was supposed to bring the neighborhood a grocery store everyone's been asking about has been sitting untouched for over a year past the purchase, and roughly five months past the announcement, with no completion date in sight.

Meanwhile, Six Weeks Down the Road

Contrast that with what happened at the other end of the same corridor. In April 2026, word got out that Duck Donuts was coming to the shopping center on Route 83 anchored by Whole Foods, right near the Darien border. That's it. That was the announcement.

By early June 2026, it had already opened. A Patch story dated June 8, 2026 confirmed the shop had been open a little more than a week at that point, meaning the whole thing, from first mention to open doors, took about six weeks. Early reviews describe it as already busy, drawing in enough of a crowd that one Yelp reviewer joked it had become a teen hangout almost immediately.

Two food-and-retail projects. Same stretch of highway. Same year. One took six weeks. The other has taken more than a year and counting, with no finish line announced.

Why the Clocks Run Differently

This isn't a story about a village dragging its feet. It's a story about who's actually making the call, and what they're optimizing for.

Duck Donuts leased space inside an existing shopping center. That's a private transaction between a tenant and a landlord who already has the building, the parking lot, and the utilities in place. Deals like that move at the speed of a lease negotiation, because there's nothing structural left to solve.

The bowling alley site is different because Willowbrook itself owns the land. The village didn't wait for a private developer to buy the old bowling alley and pitch a plan. It bought the site directly, which means every decision about what goes there, and how fast, runs through the village's own process rather than a landlord's calendar.

That choice tracks with something the village has been transparent about for years. Willowbrook operates with a notably small property tax footprint. Land use records from the county's redevelopment plan describe the village's approach on Plainfield Road as prioritizing retail and restaurant development specifically because it generates sales tax revenue, which in turn helps the village avoid leaning on property taxes for its operating budget. According to a regional economic profile from Choose DuPage, Willowbrook collects only around $66,000 a year in restricted-fund property taxes. That's a genuinely small number for a functioning village government, and it isn't an accident.

When a village that runs mostly on sales tax buys back a marquee corner itself, it isn't just filling a storefront. It's picking the tenant mix that will fund services for years, which is a slower and more deliberate decision than a landlord signing a donut shop.

A Village That Quadruples and Then Empties Out

There's a second piece to why Willowbrook plans this carefully, and it has to do with who's actually here at any given hour.

"We quadruple in size during the day," Mayor Trilla said in a Business View Magazine profile published in July 2026, describing how the village fills up with shoppers, commuters, and workers pulled in by its retail corridors and light industrial base, only to empty back out into a quieter residential rhythm by evening. Willowbrook sits right at the intersection of Route 83 and I-55, close enough to Midway Airport and Argonne National Laboratory that daytime traffic through the village has almost nothing to do with the roughly two square miles of actual housing here. Turtle Wax runs its corporate headquarters out of Willowbrook, one more reason the daytime population and the resident population are two very different numbers.

That daytime surge is exactly the customer base a retail-heavy, sales-tax-funded village needs to plan around. It's also why a corner like Plainfield and Route 83 doesn't get filled on impulse. The village isn't just picking a tenant for the neighbors. It's picking a tenant for the thousands of people passing through on a Tuesday afternoon who aren't neighbors at all.

The Infrastructure Behind the Storefronts

None of this happens without the roads underneath it holding up, and Willowbrook has been working on that too. The same Business View Magazine profile details a $4 million reconstruction of Executive Drive, completed in 2025, that fixed a decades-old drainage problem in the village's industrial corridor. The road had been designed to hold stormwater long ago, and it routinely flooded during heavy rain, closing businesses for three or four days at a stretch. Mayor Trilla called it a big deal for a town this size, and it's easy to see why: $4 million is a serious commitment for a village covering only two square miles.

It's the kind of project that never shows up on a map of new openings, but it's the same instinct at work. Fix the foundation, then decide carefully what goes on top of it.

What This Actually Looks Like Day to Day

If you live here, the practical read is simple. Small tenant deals in existing buildings, like Duck Donuts sliding into an open storefront at the Whole Foods plaza, will keep happening on a normal commercial timeline, weeks rather than years. Anything on village-owned land, especially a corner as visible as the old bowling alley site, is going to move on the village's own clock, because Willowbrook is treating it as a long-term revenue decision rather than a quick fill.

Willowbrook also runs its own Parks Department, one of only four municipalities in DuPage County to do so, according to administrator Halloran. With just four full-time staff, the department puts on roughly 600 events a year for residents from preschoolers to seniors in their nineties, and has even taken over senior programming for a few neighboring towns that scaled theirs back. That's a lot of civic life happening quietly in a village that, as Mayor Trilla put it, doesn't make a lot of news.

The Route 83 corridor is proof that it sometimes does. The donut shop is already part of the daily routine. The grocery store is still a promise the village is taking its time to keep, on purpose.

If you're curious about what else is changing along Willowbrook's commercial corridors, or want a longer look at the neighborhood beyond this stretch of Route 83, our Willowbrook neighborhood guide is a good next stop. And if you ever want to talk through what any of this means for your own home or your next move in the western suburbs, Jeff Salhani is always glad to connect. Let's talk, get your free home valuation, or just compare notes on what's opening down the street.