Quirky Corner Sullivan And Sprague Intersection A High-Traffic, High-Profile Site, But Retail Success Can Be Elusive

Billed as the Valley’s intersection of fame and fortune, Sprague Avenue and Sullivan Road has seen several of its big commercial players disappear in the last year.

Huckelberry’s grocery and Future Shop are gone, leaving huge empty storefronts on Spokane County’s busiest intersection.

Some folks might wonder if these departures spell doom for retailers at the much touted “suburban center.” But developers, store owners and county planners all say that change such as this is the one constant in the intensely competitive business of drawing shoppers in.

“This is a normal business cycle,” said Max McNett, a commercial broker with Clark Pacific Real Estate. “Retail is a very aggressive industry.”

Business at the intersection is booming.

“Tenants just want to be located there,” McNett said. “Between the Spokane Valley Mall and the Spokane Valley Plaza, it’s obviously a great access route. They have high visibility and tenants will pay for that.”

So, what happened to the big stores that have closed down?

They were victims of a finicky marketplace and corporate financial problems, developers and store owners say.

Both Huckelberry’s and Future Shop came to the Valley when construction of the Spokane Valley Mall in 1997 triggered a flood of development along the Sullivan Road corridor.

The Valley also saw Toys R Us, Fred Meyer, Best Buy and other big-box retailers pop up fast.

Local folks were flooded with shopping choices and competition kicked up as the Valley’s commercial development rapidly expanded. Sullivan would become a major retail strip.

The stiff fight for customers left a few players out of the game.

“The neighborhood didn’t support the store,” said Larry Geller, CEO of Rosauers which also runs Huckleberry’s. “Huckleberry’s takes a unique clientele. That location turned out to be a lot more conservative than expected.”

Rosauers opened the 35,000-square-foot store on the southeast corner of Sprague and Sullivan a little more than a year after it opened its 17,500-square-foot store on the South Hill. Company officials said that the competition was too fierce and the Valley store too big to maintain.

As for Future Shop, the Canadian electronics chain closed all of its 23 U.S. stores in March, including two in Spokane.

Company officials said the U.S. market just wasn’t profitable. While no one really knows, the store may have found strong success at the corner. It wasn’t that corridor that shut Future Shop down. The company was in financial trouble.

That’s also why Best left two years earlier.

In the 1980s, Best and Kmart were the only businesses established on the corridor that is now packed with strip centers, chain restaurants, latte huts and warehouse stores.

Best Products Inc. filed for bankruptcy in late 1996 and shut all of its U.S. stores down. Hastings now has a video, book and music store in a portion of Best’s former location at the southwest corner of Sprague and Sullivan.

There are some drawbacks to locating on or near that intersection, retailers said.

The rapid expansion of the corridor has meant nightmarish traffic and county planners are hustling to ease congestion.

It has sparked fierce competition, forcing many smaller family Valley businesses to shut down.

It also means that Liberty Lake is now getting a longer look from developers.

Developer Dick Vandervert said recently that the money is in Liberty Lake, where hundreds of new homes and apartments continue to pop up. That’s where a development arm of his company has taken over one shopping center and plans to build another across the street.

Residential development near Sullivan and Sprague has leveled off.

McNett understands the appeal of Liberty Lake development.

“People don’t stop at the first shopping center on the way home from work, they stop closest to home,” he said.

But the boom along Sprague and Sullivan isn’t going to wane any time soon.

Spokane County long-range planner Tim Lawhead said that, under the “focused growth” scenario for that area, Sprague and Sullivan is anticipated to become an “urban center” as residential growth proceeds east.

That scenario also includes Sprague and Sullivan as a stop for a proposed light rail system. The second scenario, “community commercial,” would see the area continue to grow commercially with expanded shopping centers, he said.