ALTER How Long Should It Take?

The following ALTER takes about 2 hours in my environment. total
number of records is about 2.8 million. IS this typical? Is there a
way to speed up this process.
BEGIN TRANSACTION
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE
SET ARITHABORT ON
SET NUMERIC_ROUNDABORT OFF
SET CONCAT_NULL_YIELDS_NULL ON
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
SET ANSI_PADDING ON
SET ANSI_WARNINGS ON
COMMIT
BEGIN TRANSACTION
ALTER TABLE dbo.PERSON ADD
FL_CNSL_NTFY char(1) NOT NULL CONSTRAINT DF_PERSON_FL_CNSL_NTFY
DEFAULT '',
CD_INTRP_NEED smallint NOT NULL CONSTRAINT DF_PERSON_CD_INTRP_NEED
DEFAULT 0
GO
COMMIT

Thanks for any tips on this issue....