Thin profit margins, complex staffing, controlling costs — the restaurant business is nowhere near as easy as it looks to the diner just trying to enjoy a simple hamburger or a decent steak.
It’s a lesson Wagon Box owner Paul McNiel has been learning the hard way, and it’s led him to explore options for the historic vacation lodge he owns in Story, Wyoming.
“From the beginning, I’ve never been a restaurant guy,” McNiel told Cowboy State Daily. “I thought it’d be an interesting project. It’s a beautiful property, but to run a restaurant, I think you kind of have to be there all the time.”
McNiel said the restaurants he likes the most when traveling have a dedicated owner who is right there, tending to day-to-day business.
“And I’ve got too much going on in other places,” he said. “So that’s not going to be me.”
He now seeks someone who either wants to own the restaurant portion of the Wagon Box or lease it.
“I still like the events and the place,” McNiel said. “So, we’re trying to spin off the restaurant so we can focus more on the lodging and events.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that McNiel wouldn’t sell the entire business, if the right offer came along.
“If someone wanted to strike a check for, I don’t know, $4 million for the whole 20-acre parcel, they might be able to talk me into walking away,” he said.
Everything’s for sale for the right price, he agreed.
“That’s just the American way,” he said.
Fries And A Side Of Philosophy
Drive-throughs and restaurants have learned to upsell their burgers with a side of fries, but, at the Wagon Box, the upsell is a side of philosophy.
McNiel’s vision for the Wagon Box is a place where people can come together for retreats that question everything: man and the machine, crumbling liberalism and the rising dissident right.
Also, bitcoin and DAOs — decentralized autonomous organizations. They are a sort of digital club, whose members use things like blockchain to record transactions or stablecoins to cast votes.
DAOs are what initially shook up Story residents, causing a firestorm for the fledgling business in the very early days, when McNiel was still restoring the place and working on his ideas for it.
Since then, catchy but provocatively titled events have continued. Some of which have drawn national media and created more firestorms.
“Dawn in the West: A Futurist Serata,” subtitled, “An Uncle Ted Talk,” is just one recent example.
Uncle Ted, McNiel confirmed, is Ted Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber,” a domestic terrorist who murdered three people and injured 23 more in mail bombings until he was caught in 1996.
“Ted was a computer programmer,” McNiel said. “But also, obviously, had some serious reservations about technology. We obviously don’t condone his methods, but a lot of people are just complex, and Uncle Ted is a complex character.
“The bottom line is, I want to explore what does it mean to be an American,” McNiel continued. “I feel the frontier is an important part of that question. I feel like the Mountain West still inhabits a certain place in the American imagination that I think we need right now, to really, like, reconnect with what does it mean to be an American?”
The events have attracted what critics characterize as weird, fringe elements of society.
The Machine and (Human) Nature retreat, in 2024, for example, played host to a collection of “Doomer Optimists.” The term refers to a group of people who are both pessimistic about the future in the face of ever-advancing technology and optimistic about building a resilient meaningful future in spite of any and all challenges.
The event, according to an online description, was organized to discuss “the role of technology, transhumanism, and how to find meaning in the face of the ever-advancing machine,” as well as “discuss and showcase forms of creative resistance.”
Tough Sell
Those kinds of events are bound to make finding a partner or investor for the restaurant a little bit tricky, Story resident Mark Caudle told Cowboy State Daily.
Caudle is president of the Story Days Committee, which puts on the community’s annual celebration. He’s also worked with McNiel directly, including a stint as his general manager, and he still does occasional work for him.
“He’s had some crazy, wild people in here with different things,” Caudle said.
And it’s kept the community stirred up to a degree, though perhaps none more so than the fledgling DAO McNiel considered very early on, which was then described as a kind of digital timeshare. Artists, writers, philosophers and other thinkers would buy time slots at the retreat.
It was meant as a way of members supporting the Wagon Box.
“He kind of shot himself in the foot right there in the beginning, with that DAO thing,” Caudle said. “And I looked that up and a DAO is a business move. It’s not actually that stupid of an idea.
“I mean, personally, I would have just done my business and not said anything about it. I don’t go around telling people I’m incorporated and an LLC. I just say the name of my business, so I don’t even know why he had that in there.”
Community Vitality
Caudle sees the Wagon Box through a lens of community vitality, and he counts himself among those rooting for the Wagon Box to succeed.
“Wagon Box opened in 1907, so it has a lot of history, and it’s a staple of the community, so people want it to succeed because it’s the history,” he said. “There are a lot of naysayers, but there are plenty of people who approve, too.”
An operable Wagon box helps other tourism-related businesses, Caudle added.
“Patrick and Paula Morgan, who own the Story Pines Inn here, they’re trying to get that place booked up,” Caudle said. “But it’s hard when there’s no places to go have breakfast or have lunch and things like that.”
Hungry people can readily ignore side events that raise eyebrows when breakfast or dinner is at stake.
“I would say people are tolerating this more because they’re just, ‘We need a place to eat here in town,’” Caudle said. “And at the end of the day, it’s his business and he can do what he wants.”
But restaurant business is hard in general, Caudle added, without any extra, added layers of complexity.
“I hope he pulls it off and is able to turn it around,” he said. “In my opinion, I think it’s going to be really hard to find someone who wants to follow his vision, but I think, once he does, it’s going to go really good. He’s just going to have to find someone who wants to follow his vision.”
Isn’t It Ironic
McNiel believes his mission continues to be misunderstood by critics, and he is particularly frustrated with national media articles, which he says have quoted him out of context and mischaracterized his efforts.
“I don’t know if you saw the Guardian did a hit piece on (me),” he said, “You know, I’ve been kind of lumped in with the new right, or dissident right.”
The “dissident right” is something McNiel said he’s still trying to figure out himself.
“The new right is like, let’s deal with America,” he said. “Let’s not get involved in everybody’s business. The old right was very pro free trade but the new right’s like, ‘Man, our factories and our manufacturing base has been eviscerated. There’s nothing left to do but service industry and these giant investment corporations are gobbling stuff up and this is a problem. Lots of working people are struggling.”
There are people in the “new right” that McNiel said he agrees with, and others he particularly doesn’t.
“Meanwhile,” he added, “all the locals, 95% of whom are far, hard right are, like, treating me like I’m some kind of Jackson Hole liberal or something.”
All of which feels a little too ironic in a sing-songy, Alanis Morrissette kind of way.
Anyone genuinely curious about events at the Wagon Box, McNiel added, is welcome to come and check it out for themselves.
“Like if you’re curious, ‘Oh what are these events you people are having,’ come to an event,” he said. “I’m on all the social media. I’m here a lot. My phone number is all over the place. So, reach out and ask me.”
DAO Is Dead, But Still Top Complaint
McNiel said he continues to get backlash over his earliest exploration, the whole Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) flap, which drew more than 150 or so people to a town hall McNiel organized in 2023 to answer questions about his intentions for the historic property’s future.
“Frankly, what’s frustrating is, I’m not sold on crypto, Bitcoin, you know, whatever,” he said. “Part of me is like anti-tech, anti-screen, Luddite. Part of me is like, ‘Hey this is the future, we might as well use it, get involved on the ground floor or whatever.’ So, I’m torn on it, and we’ve had events that explore that.”
After the meeting in 2023, though, McNiel said he decided not to pursue a DAO at all. Even though, as he sees things, it was just another form of a limited liability corporation under Wyoming laws. Kind of like owning a virtual McDonald’s.
“I floated the idea two, three years ago, and I was literally trying to support Wyoming legislation,” he said. “It never went anywhere. We’ve done nothing with it.”
Yet it’s still the top complaint McNiel hears about.
“Which is ridiculous, because one, it has nothing to do with them,” McNiel said. “And two, it didn’t even happen.”
A DAO acting as a digital timeshare, he added, wouldn’t bring any more strangers to the Story community than a campground/resort that’s open for business to tourists would.
“News flash,” McNiel said. “It’s been a resort for a hundred years.”
Getting The Vision
McNiel hasn’t formally listed the Wagon Box’s restaurant for sale, partly because he’s still “intent on making the Wagon Box project work.”
That means he really needs the right partner or investor. Someone who gets his vision of the Wagon Box as a retreat where people pick apart and explore modern society and ask big questions.
“Again, if someone wants to strike a check and buy the whole shooting match, I’m open,” he said. “But I’d like to pull off a project — the sort of events we’ve been running, and the people we’ve been gathering here who are really looking to have conversations about what does it mean to be an American.”
McNiel believes this is an era of big change. The questions are weighty and difficult, and society is approaching, perhaps, a fork in the road, where difficult choices must be made.”
“What do we do about the technology question? What does it mean to be conservative?” McNiel said. “How do we balance being a Christian nation or people and, like, being accepting of people of other faiths? That’s been tricky. That conversation needs to be had, so we’re trying to have some of those.”
Minimal Investment For Restaurant
The restaurant side would need minimal investment operationally, McNiel believes. He’s already done a lot of work to spruce up the location when he first purchased the Wagon Box.
A library area was built, for example, with comfortable seats, offering a place to read and discuss books, play games, or just enjoy a nightcap with a friend.
“We put in beautiful booths, which are kind of a family friendly thing,” he said. “I talked to some families, and they said they like booths because you can kind of contain the kids and also get a little bit more privacy.”
McNiel also brought in a grand piano and has a roster of live musicians who come in to play at the Wagon Box on a regular basis.
“The bathrooms all needed intensive work, and our bathrooms I think are beautiful now,” he said. “I worked carefully with a local contractor and picked up a tile that has a kind of old-school look.”
A changing station was added to the women’s restroom. A large sandbox was built off the deck for children to play in, and a wood stove was added to the front area.
“We tore out the pellet stove insert for the main fireplace,” he said. “I think there’s something very human and healthy and American even about an open fireplace. So, we’ve got the open fireplace.”
McNiel is himself both a hunter and trapper, so there are moose antlers over the fireplace, as well as pelts and traps decorating the walls.
“(It’s) kind of leaning into the sort of mountain pioneer lifestyle that’s important to me,” he said. “And kind of an important part of the American idea.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
