ON TARGET: Fullerton Set for Third Store As Retailer’s Expansion Plays Out
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
Retail’s changing landscape is playing out in Fullerton.
Target Corp. plans to add its third store in the North County city by midyear, moving into a site formerly housing a Wards department store on Orangethorpe Avenue near Harbor Boulevard.
The store was one of several that closed in Orange County as part of Chicago-based Montgomery Ward LLC’s shutdown that played out last year.
Target “moved quickly to acquire many former Wards sites and this was one of them,” said Kay Miller, Fullerton’s economic development manager.
The store, in the Metro Center shopping area, is undergoing renovation.
The Irvine office of Baltimore-based Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. is handling the work.
The move shows how Target’s expansion is playing out in OC.
The Minneapolis-based retailer opened its second Fullerton store in November, at the city’s Amerige Heights housing, retail and industrial development.
Target’s third Fullerton store is near California State University, Fullerton, on the Placentia border. The city is set to be the only one in OC with three Targets.
“Each store has its own merits and its own draw,” said Aimee Sands, a Target spokeswoman.
The area counts one other Target in La Habra on the Fullerton border.
The expansion of Target and other retailers is helping to prop up employment growth in OC while the state and nation are shedding jobs.
Economists expect OC employment this year to grow around 1%, or 10,000 to 15,000 jobs, with retailers accounting for about 20% of the new jobs.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Wisconsin’s Kohl’s Corp. also are adding stores in OC, helping to offset loses from Wards and struggling Kmart Corp.
This isn’t the first time Fullerton has watched the changing of the retail guard.
“There’s always going to be ebb and a flow in and out of these centers,” said the city’s Miller.
She went on to cite a list of bygone retailers: Gemco, Boston Store, Woolworth’s, Zody’s, National Lumber, Handy Man Hardware, Federated, Silo.
Those stores were “hot in the ’60s and ’70s and gone in the ’80s,” she said.
Two Kmart stores closed in Fullerton in the 1980s, according to Miller.
Target and Wal-Mart are the industry’s new “gorillas,” she said.
Miller said she was unaware of whether Wal-Mart had looked at the former Wards site. The nation’s largest retailer,and company of any size by sales,has stores in Brea and Anaheim, but not Fullerton.
“There are or will be Wal-Marts all around Fullerton,” Miller said, with stores slated for La Habra and Buena Park.
