What’s Missing in Crozet? (2026 edition)

We Have Stuff, and We Have More Than We Might Think.

Part one of two.

I saw a post the other day asking why Crozet doesn’t have a chiropractor.

Fair question. Except we do, they just happen to be in Ivy and Charlottesville. I think the premise was a bit off — the feeling behind it isn’t.

While Crozet’s population has nearly quadrupled in a generation, it’s still not that big. Bigger than when I moved here? Yes. Bigger than when you moved here? Also probably yes. Big enough to support all the services that Charlottesville and Waynesboro offer? Nope.

The Census counted 2,820 of us in 2000, 5,565 in 2010, 9,224 in 2020, and somewhere around 10,800 now. You watch a town double, then double again, and one might expect the storefronts to keep pace, but we have a lot of vacancies, and an office building coming to 240 near Starr Hill and one of our veterinarians.

So let’s take the real question seriously. Not “where’s the chiropractor” — they’re pretty close — but why does a town this size still feel thin to some?

The answer starts with a distinction: goods and services are not the same animal.

You can’t ship a service. Nobody has figured out (yet) how to Amazon a haircut (we’ve got places to get haircuts), a filling (we have lots of dentists), a pizza night (Sal’s, Crozet Pizza, Domino’s or Dr. Ho’s?) , or a chiropractic adjustment. Services need bodies — local ones, present, on a Tuesday. And that’s exactly the thing Crozet spent thirty years not having enough of. We built a bedroom community. People slept here and worked somewhere else.

In 2007 I asked, What Does Crozet Need?

Two of my favorite comments from that post:

“While I can understand the resentment towards new residents, please remember that at some point in time, YOU too were a new resident that added a car or two to the roads. In addition, if you moved to Crozet 20 years ago (or any time frame for that matter), don’t you think that some of your neighbors who had been living in Crozet for years earlier were resentful that you moved in? I seriously doubt that all of them were jumping for joy. If you want to have an attitude of resentment, that’s your right, but you should also be resentful towards your fellow citizens that decided to sell their land to the developers. If you didn’t try to persuade your fellow citizens to not sell their land, or if you didn’t participate in the public hearings that occurred while the land was in the application process, don’t be too resentful.”

“Let us hope that Old Trail fulfills its promise. That way we may be able to enjoy amenities within walking distance (yes, a coffee shop, movie theater should be among them).”

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Goods are the opposite problem. Online didn’t dent retail, it ate the business model. The population that would have supported a department store in 1985 now supports a fulfillment center two hours away. Why stock a general store with what’s already landing on your porch by dinner? That isn’t a Crozet problem. That’s every small town in America. And Crozet *never* had all the stuff that bigger communities had, but we had enough.

Then there’s the drive. It’s about twelve miles to Charlottesville (and about the same to Waynesboro) — but call it what it is, a real 23-to-27-minutes each way (unless you leave before 6am) . The average Crozet commute runs 27.4 minutes. That cuts both directions. It’s the best argument for local services — who wants a fifty-minute round trip for a trim? — and it’s the reason we historically didn’t have them.

We were already in town for work. We bundled the errands. The dry cleaner, the doctor, the coffee got bought over there because you were over there anyway.

What actually changed

Here’s a part that reframes everything.

The Census Bureau’s most recent five-year survey (2020–2024) puts work-from-home in Crozet at about 27% — double the national rate. Not commuted — stayed. That’s double the national rate of 13.3%, and roughly five times what “working from home” meant anywhere before 2020, when the national figure sat under six percent. Granted, that includes the pandemic shift and peak, but still. (relevant and related podcast: The Data is in on Work from Home)

Run it against our numbers. Crozet has around 4,500 working residents. If around twenty-seven percent of them are home on a weekday, that’s roughly 1,200 people who used to be in an office — in town, or over the mountain — and now aren’t. Twelve hundred people. That’s not a rounding error. That’s why we have Yellow Mug, Mudhouse, Praha, and Grit coffee shops for example.

And look what showed up. The coffee shops with so many laptops. The lunch spots. Crozet Creamery. The breweries where there are also laptops. That isn’t charity or nostalgia. It’s arithmetic. The daytime population finally got big enough to pay for it.

So the honest answer to the chiropractor question: we have one nearby, we have more services than many assume, and we have what we have because a long commute plus a work-from-home boom finally put enough weekday bodies in Crozet to make them pencil out.

What we still won’t get (thankfully) is the big-box and the franchise restaurants. Not because we’re too small for a chiropractor — we’re plenty big for that, always were. But because that kind of store needs a larger, non-leaking market than we have, and online already killed half of it. Goods, not services. Don’t confuse the two.

Some services will keep coming. The stores mostly won’t. Do we have *everything*? Nope. Will we? Hopefully not, but I’d love to see a biggish employer with jobs where our kids can work, stay, climb the ladder if they want.

And that second part isn’t a population problem at all. It’s a square-footage problem, and a policy problem — one Crozet chose on purpose. That’s the next post.

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I occasionally hear someone say that Crozet needs a Chik-Fil-A. I asked Gemini to do some math. Is it wrong? If not, is it reasonable or logical to think we have the population to accommodate this? Probably not, at least not before the 64/250 interchange is developed (as it may be at some point in the future)

The Traffic Math

While they don’t release exact customer counts, we can estimate their daily foot and drive-thru traffic based on their revenue:

• Daily Revenue: $9,000,000 in annual sales ÷ 313 operating days = ~$28,750 per day.
• Estimated Orders: If the average order (or “ticket”) is roughly $15, a single stand-alone location processes around 1,900 to 2,000 transactions per day.

Because a single transaction often represents a car with multiple people in it, the actual human foot traffic (or passenger count) is likely significantly higher. To handle this kind of volume, Chick-fil-A pioneered “upstream ordering”—deploying employees with tablets into the drive-thru lanes—which allows them to maintain industry-leading service speeds even with constant traffic jams.