If you drove Morganton Road in July of last year and again this month, you already know the corner across from Target does not look the same. A Whataburger just switched on its 24-hour sign, the Target plaza has a farm-to-table restaurant angling for the corner spot, and the new Moore County ABC flagship is quietly pulling weekend traffic off Broad Street in a way locals are still adjusting to.
The point of this post is not to list what opened. It is to say something I think residents are only half-noticing: the county's weekday retail and dining gravity has moved. Broad Street is still the place you park once and walk, but the day-in, day-out volume — the run for coffee and a cobbler, the drive-through dinner between the range and pickup, the liquor and wine stop before a dinner party — is now happening two miles south. If you understand the split, you get your Saturday back.
The corridor, by opening date
Five specific arrivals reshaped the Morganton Road / US-15 corridor between February and June of this year. Together they add up to something the individual press releases undersell.
| Business | Opened | Address | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peach Cobbler Factory | Feb. 21, 2026 | 10574 US-15 | First Sandhills location for the franchise |
| Golden Corral Favorites | April 22, 2026 | 10735 US-15 | New 4,200 sq ft fast-casual concept |
| Moore County ABC (new flagship) | April 23, 2026 | 420 Capital Drive | Replaces the older store, adds tasting bar |
| Whataburger | June 18, 2026 | Morganton South Shopping Center | 24-hour operation, double drive-through |
| Bounty Farmhouse Kitchen & Tap | Early 2026 | Corner of Target plaza | Farm-to-table with in-house beer brand |
Two of those are dessert-and-value plays, two are volume drive-throughs, and one is a legitimate destination restaurant. That mix is the story.
The Peach Cobbler Factory opened its 15th North Carolina location at noon on Saturday, Feb. 21, at 10574 U.S. Highway 15-501 in Southern Pines, marking the company's first location in the Sandhills region. The Southern Pines store is owned and operated by Sheumae Quick, and the shop keeps noon-to-10 hours seven days a week, which is genuinely useful if you have ever tried to find dessert in Moore County after 9 p.m.
The Golden Corral piece is more interesting than the name suggests. The new restaurant, at 10735 US-15, is a 4,200-square-foot space offering a curated selection of the brand's classics in a format that prioritizes speed and convenience. Opening festivities on April 22 included a ribbon-cutting with the Moore County Chamber of Commerce and the Pinecrest Air Force Junior ROTC. This is not a buffet. It is the brand's fast-casual pilot, and it landed here first.
Whataburger is the one your out-of-town family will ask about. The Southern Pines Whataburger opened June 18 in the Morganton South Shopping Center, across from Target and near Starbucks and BJ's Wholesale Club, with 58 seats, a double drive-through, and 24-hour operation. A 24-hour anything is a real change for this corridor.
Why Bounty is the one to watch
Bounty Farmhouse Kitchen & Tap has snagged the corner spot in the Target shopping center, and this is Bounty's second location; the flagship opened in Fayetteville. Owner Chris Beal, a fifth-generation Chatham County native, is planning a design that "brings the outside in," with around 35 seats inside and 30 more on the patio, through his company Tribeca Hospitality, which also operates Tribeca Tavern in Cary and WCC Café in Morrisville.
Read that seating count against the drive-throughs on the same block. A 65-seat farm-to-table restaurant with its own beer brand is not chasing lunch-rush volume from the Target parking lot. It is betting that the same corridor now supports a sit-down destination, which is a very different bet from the one Broad Street restaurants have been making for a decade. If Bounty holds its patio on a Saturday night, the corridor is no longer a "run errands and leave" place. It becomes a place people go on purpose.
The frame: Morganton Park South is $80 million of retail
The reason all of this landed in the same six months is that the plaza itself is new. Morganton Park South in Southern Pines is an $80 million retail project anchored by Target. That is the container. Whataburger, Bounty, the wider Target orbit — they are the tenants filling it out.
Set that against the county's broader retail picture: Moore County is a regional retail hub, with taxable retail sales topping $2.6 billion in fiscal 2025, and the county's population reached an estimated 110,619 in 2025, up from 99,727 in 2020. A corridor with an $80 million retail anchor and a 10,000-plus population gain in five years is going to attract exactly the kind of tenants that showed up this spring.
The ABC store is doing more than selling bottles
The new Moore County ABC on Capital Drive is worth a paragraph on its own because most residents have not yet been inside. The new complex opened April 23 and includes a retail store, administrative offices, and a 10,000-square-foot warehouse. Construction took about eight months and cost roughly $6.5 million, all built using ABC profits rather than tax dollars. The retail store is equipped with a tasting bar to host brand representatives and other sales reps, which is a legitimately new amenity for the county.
During the last fiscal year, the Moore County ABC system provided more than $177,000 to law enforcement and more than $213,000 combined for scholarships and grants to nonprofits, and in total, more than $844,000 in profits was returned directly to county and municipal governments.
The new store is located at 420 Capital Drive, in the plaza next to Sandhills Community College. If you host, that address matters. If you don't, it still matters, because the tasting-bar model is going to change how people plan dinner parties here.
What Broad Street kept, and where it is going
None of the above touches Broad Street's core, and I think that is the healthy read. Broad Street is not being displaced. It is being freed to be the walkable, cultural, weekend-morning half of the county.
Two facts anchor that. First, the Saturday market has not moved and has not shortened its season. The Moore County Farmers Market in Downtown Southern Pines runs each Saturday from March 14 through November 21, 2026, 8 a.m. to noon at the Downtown Southern Pines Park green space. Live music is scheduled from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, weather permitting, through the end of October. The Thursday market at the Armory Sports Complex, 604 W. Morganton Rd., runs year-round from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. — same corridor, different day, different function.
Second, the hospitality bets on Broad Street are getting more sophisticated, not less. Aberdeen is welcoming a Courtyard by Marriott in late November, owned by Southern Pines-based McPeake Hotels, and the company is moving forward with plans for a boutique Tapestry by Hilton on Broad Street in downtown Southern Pines. A boutique flag on Broad Street is a signal that overnight guests are being pointed at the walkable core, not at the highway plazas. That is the split becoming explicit.
A Saturday that uses both halves
Here is the practical version of the argument. If you already live here, your Saturday now has a better shape than it did a year ago.
- 8:30 a.m., Downtown Southern Pines Park. Farmers market. Coffee, produce for the week, one loaf of bread you did not need but bought anyway. Skip if it is raining.
- 10:15 a.m., Broad Street proper. Live music kicks in at the market, but this is also the window to actually walk the shops without contending with lunch traffic.
- 11:45 a.m., over to the corridor. Peach Cobbler Factory for the takeaway cobbler, or Bounty for a proper sit-down lunch on the patio. This is when the corridor is at its best; the drive-through lines have not built yet.
- 1:30 p.m., Capital Drive. The new ABC store if you are hosting, plus the Sandhills Community College side of that plaza if you have a class or a Foundation event on your calendar.
- Evening, back to Broad Street. Dinner where you can walk between the restaurant and the car. That is the thing the corridor cannot offer and probably never will.
The point is not the itinerary. It is that the county now supports two distinct trip patterns on the same day, and residents who plan around the split spend less time in the car than residents who treat all of it as "downtown."
What this means if you own here
For homeowners, the practical read is that Morganton Road frontage is doing more work than it was 18 months ago. The corridor is absorbing volume that used to spread across older plazas, and the new-tenant mix suggests the plaza owners expect that trend to continue. For anyone considering a move within the county, or a second home purchase driven by lifestyle rather than golf calendars, the split between corridor and core is now a real factor in where you want to be within a five-mile radius of Broad Street.
If you'd like to talk through how any of this affects a specific street, plaza, or price band you're watching, I'm always happy to compare notes. Reach out through Kelly Ward and let's connect.
