Developer submits Sam's Club and Chick-fil-A plans for Visalia site near Costco
Plans for a 171,000 square-foot Sam's Club warehouse and gas station as well as a Chick-fil-A double-lane drive-through restaurant have been submitted by the developer of a shopping center on South Mooney Boulevard this month.
Developer Jim Shehaday of Fresno said he could not comment on the tenants he is working with but local sources confirm both the big box applicant as well as the name of the fast food restaurant. Visalia's Mayor Brian Poochigian was more careful not to mention a tenant saying only that he "is happy Visalia will have a new big box store to shop in."
The development is a big step forward from last year's preliminary site plan application by Shehaday with this significant project now heading to the city planning commission where a conditional use permit application will be heard.
That hearing could come in about three months, suggested Visalia Cristobal Carrillo, a city planner. Without naming names, Shehaday confirms that he is under contract with the big box user. Regarding the fast food applicant, Shehaday says that he is in possession of a Letter of Intent from a company. Developers typically have to work with non-disclosure clauses in their contracts.
Sam's Club, owned by Walmart, is a membership warehouse like Costco, which has been making news in town themselves with plans submitted for a second warehouse store at Riggin Avenue and Shirk Road expected to break ground this year.
The city received boxes of traffic studies and detailed site plan drawings for the multi-tenant Mooney project this past week but that does not mean both projects will happen for sure, considering developer Shehaday is still in a “due diligence” phase of development. The 27-acre shopping center at the southwest corner of Mooney and Visalia Parkway at the southern end of Visalia would enjoy easy access from the Tulare area as well. Next to Sam's Club would be a 12-pump gas station, a car wash and several restaurants.
The proposed big shopping center has 922 parking spaces.The revised plan for the shopping center called Visalia Commons is the same regional shopping center where Visalia City Council turned down a proposed CarMax dealership a few years ago - but the center does have some new existing restaurants and stores along the frontage including Texas Roadhouse, Les Schwab, Panda Express and Dutch Bros - already in business. This new anchor tenant would be the third proposed for the South Mooney center including CarMax and a proposed movie theater that stalled.
There are Sam’s Club stores in Bakersfield and Fresno. Both have company gas stations next to the stores like the Visalia site plan. Besides general merchandise, Sam's Club stores sell groceries, cigarettes and have an automotive service center. The average Sam's Club store employs about 200.
The company recently announced they would add more stores, and the stores would be larger.
For the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2023, Sam’s Club’s revenue was $84.3 billion. There are almost 600 clubs across the U.S and Puerto Rico and each averages approximately 136,000 square-feet. The first Sam’s Club (named for Walmart founder Sam Walton) opened in Midwest City, Oklahoma, in 1983.
More chicken?
A site plan for a large 5,600 square-foot fast food restaurant with a double-lane drive-through appears to have the design of a Chick-fil-A store, although this is more speculative.
Headquartered in College Park, Georgia, Chick-fil-A operates 2,988 restaurants across 48 states. Chick-fil-A has retained its popularity in polls as the country's favorite fast food chain for the eighth consecutive year.
Chick-fil-A grossed an average of $4.8 million per restaurant in 2016, despite operating just six days a week, the highest sales of all fast-food restaurants in the United States. Whataburger was second with $2.7 million per restaurant average.
In 2019, Chick-fil-A reported $11.3 billion in sales in the United States, behind only McDonald's with $40.4 billion in sales that year.
To compete with Chick-fil-A, fried chicken chain Popeyes, followed by others, introduced a fried chicken sandwich in 2019, starting what was termed the Chicken Sandwich Wars.
Visalia has gone bonkers for chicken restaurants in the past few years attracting many of the nations’ biggest chicken chains to town with even some double locations here.
Chick-fil-A typically sites only one or two locations in a metro area, even in much larger cities like Fresno.
This article originally appeared on Salinas Californian: Developer submits Sam's Club and Chick-fil-A plans for Visalia sites
