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Lowe's to open as chain quickly grows
By ANNE LINDBERG
© St. Petersburg Times, PINELLAS PARK -- The warning beep of machinery in reverse pierces the air. Pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped items block the chain saw aisle. A worker scurries back and forth setting gardening books -- Roses for Dummies -- in their proper places. The frenzy has a goal: Get everything in place so Lowe's can open at 6 a.m. Friday, the store's "soft" opening. The grand one is 10 a.m. Aug. 22. "I welcome them to the city," Pinellas Park Mayor Bill Mischler said. "I'm glad we are getting the quality businesses like Lowe's." Lowe's will be the first of several large retailers to open Pinellas Park stores in the near future. The most anticipated of those likely will be the Wal-Mart supercenter, the first in south Pinellas, which is on schedule for a mid- to late-October opening, said Tom Shevlin, the city's assistant community development director. Lowe's began in Wilkesboro, N.C., as North Wilkesboro Hardware. The name was changed more than 55 years ago after H. C. Buchan bought out James Lowe's share of the business. Lowe's has grown to be the second-largest retailer of home improvement products in the world; last year's sales topped $18-billion. Overall, the company ranks 15th in size among all U.S. retailers and 34th in the world. Lowe's has more than 100,000 employees working in 660 stores in 40 states. The company is in the middle of a $2-billion expansion plan, the most aggressive in its history, and is opening more than one store each week. Lowe's caters to both the do-it-yourselfer and the commercial business customer, stocking more than 40,000 items, including lumber, tools, appliances and home decor items. The Pinellas Park Lowe's will employ 150 people, mostly from the city and the surrounding area, said store manager Marty Nichols, a 10-year company veteran who moved here from Charlotte, N.C., to open the store. "We took an empty building and turned it into a store," Nichols said. "It's just very rewarding to see it come from the ground up." The store will be one of the first to have interior decorators on staff to help customers. Store hours will be 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sundays. The store sits on the site of the former Mustang Flea Market at 7301 Park Blvd. It will soon be joined by a Publix. A CVS pharmacy plans to move in next door. The location also is notable for being midway between two Home Depots, one in Pinellas Park, the other in Seminole. That's part of marketing, Mischler said. Look at malls; Sears builds next to JC Penney and both do well, he said. "I don't really think it's going to hurt Home Depot," he said. A Lowe's spokesperson did not return a phone message asking for comment about the positioning of the stores. But in the past, company spokeswoman Suzanne McCoy has said that Lowe's does demographic and other marketing studies to determine where to locate stores. The company, she said then, does not deliberately follow Home Depot and challenge it head to head as it has on 22nd Avenue N in St. Petersburg. It's natural, McCoy said, that a vibrant market would appeal not just to Lowe's but also to its competitors, so to find the two near each other is not unusual. Sometimes Home Depot or another competitor comes first, as in the Pinellas Park/Seminole and St. Petersburg situations, and sometimes Lowe's comes first, she said.
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From the Times South Pinellas desks |
