Wally’s, a mega-convenience-store chain with sites in Illinois and Missouri, will build its third and largest location in its third state, Indiana, the retailer revealed on Facebook.
Wally’s opened a 30,000-square-foot travel center in Pontiac, Illinois, off of Interstate 55, south of Chicago, in 2020. It opened a 36,000-square-foot location in its home town of Fenton, Missouri, off of Interstate 44, near St. Louis, in 2022.
- Click here to take a look inside the Pontiac store.
Plans now call for the site—off of Interstate 65 in Whitestown, Indiana, near Indianapolis—to feature a 45,000-square-foot store with a food court, gift shop, c-store and restrooms; 80 gas pumps; and 15 to 20 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, according to a report by the Indianapolis Business Journal. It will have both Tesla superchargers and non-Tesla chargers. The 24-hour store will employ about 150 to 200 workers.
The Whitestown Town Council is expected to review plans for Wally’s at its meeting on July 12, said the newspaper, The company hopes to break ground after Labor Day and open in late 2024, the report said.
“We’ve been actively looking for a long time, so it took quite a bit of time to find the right spot,” Wally’s CEO Michael Rubenstein told IBJ. “The more important things to us are not just traffic count, but access and visibility.”
“The amount of people that come to our store that don’t get gas is extremely high, basically proving the point that we’ve created a food destination,” he said. “We really are destination stops. Our expectation is that we’ll capture a lot of travelers coming up and down this corridor and [be] a one-stop shop for anything that someone on the road would need.”
Drawing inspiration from the idyllic family road trips of the 1970s and 1980s—the retailer’s tagline is “Home of the Great American Road Trip”—the space houses “meticulously clean” bathrooms and a Wally’s Cafe, featuring a hand-carved BBQ station, freshly made sandwiches, jerky by the pound, freshly popped popcorn, hand-scooped ice cream and fresh baked goods.
Meanwhile, in June, Wally's rival Buc-ee’s Ltd. opened its 46th convenience store in Sevierville, Tennessee. The store’s 74,000-square-foot floor plan makes it the largest c-store in the world, the company said.
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