Drive west on Polk Street past Elm Avenue and you used to slow down without meaning to. The old Kmart sat there for seven years with its sign gone and its parking lot cracking, a landmark for what wasn't there anymore. A few blocks over, the Rite Aid closed too, leaving a second empty shell on the same short stretch of road. For most of the late 2010s and early 2020s, that corner of town was where you pointed when explaining to a friend why Coalinga's shopping options felt thin.
That's changed, but not all at once, and not evenly. Ross Dress for Less held its grand opening on July 18, and if you've been past Polk and Elm this month you've already seen the parking lot full again. What's easy to miss, if you're only tracking the headline, is that Ross is one piece of a deal that was announced back in 2024, and the other two names attached to it, Grocery Outlet and Five Below, still don't have opening dates. Understanding why tells you more about how retail actually returns to a town like Coalinga than the ribbon-cutting photo does.
What Actually Opened
The Ross that opened this July sits in the old Rite Aid building at Polk and Elm, not the former Kmart. The city held a soft opening on July 17 and a full ribbon-cutting the next morning, with Mayor Nathan Vosburg and Assistant City Manager Jesse Barron on hand to mark it as the kind of retail investment the city has been trying to land for years. Construction on the space had only been confirmed publicly in January, which means the turnaround from visible groundwork to open doors ran about six months, quick by the standards of this particular corner of town.
That's the part worth sitting with. Six months is fast. Everything before it was not.
The Domino Before This One
Tractor Supply was the first sign that the neighborhood's dead retail was coming back to life. It opened in the former Kmart building at 25 West Polk Street in March 2024, filling a fraction of a box that had sat vacant since Kmart closed in March 2017. That's seven years of an empty anchor store on one of the busiest corridors in town, the kind of vacancy that becomes part of a place's identity whether anyone wants it to or not.
Two months after Tractor Supply opened, the city confirmed that Ross had approved a location nearby, and that Grocery Outlet and Five Below had committed to join it. At the time, all three were framed as roughly a package, expected to open sometime in 2025 once the existing property was remodeled. Ross made it, eventually. It just took an extra year and a half past that original target, and it landed in a different building than the one most people assumed it would.
The Two Names Still Missing
Grocery Outlet and Five Below have not opened. There's no public opening date for either as of this writing, more than two years after they were first named alongside Ross and roughly a year and a half past the original 2025 target. That doesn't mean the deal fell through. It means the version of the story residents got in 2024, three retailers, one announcement, one timeline, was never how it was actually going to unfold.
If you've been waiting to hear that Grocery Outlet is finally close, the honest answer is that nobody outside the companies involved knows yet, and the pattern set by Ross suggests it could still be a while. A few things to keep in mind while you wait:
- Ross went from a public construction announcement to a grand opening in about six months, but from initial commitment to actual opening, closer to two years.
- Grocery Outlet and Five Below were named at the same time as Ross in 2024, which puts them on a similar or later clock, not a shorter one.
- Neither company has issued a Coalinga-specific construction announcement yet, which was the signal that reliably preceded Ross opening by about half a year.
None of that is a complaint about the city or the retailers. Big-box leasing runs on permitting, buildout schedules, and corporate real estate calendars that don't move faster because a neighboring store already opened. If anything, Ross opening first is a decent sign the pipeline is real. It just means the rest of it moves on its own clock.
Why The Gap Exists
Package announcements like the 2024 one are common in small-market retail development because they let a city and a developer market momentum before any single deal is finished. Naming three retailers at once signals to residents, and to other potential tenants, that a dead corridor is worth paying attention to again. But each retailer still negotiates its own lease, its own buildout timeline, and its own opening date. Coalinga's own site-selection materials describe the Polk Street corridor as serving a trade area of more than 40,000 people across Coalinga, Avenal, Huron, and Kettleman City, with roughly 11,200 vehicles passing that stretch of West Polk Street daily. That's a real draw, and it's likely part of why three separate national chains were willing to commit to the same two blocks in the first place. It doesn't change the fact that each one builds out on its own schedule.
For daily shopping needs in the meantime, the town's existing grocery options haven't gone anywhere. Save Mart, State Foods Supermarket, and DG Market remain the working answer to where residents buy groceries, alongside the Dollar Tree at the Coalinga Shopping Center on West Polk. Grocery Outlet will eventually add another option to that list. It's just not the one to plan a shopping trip around yet.
The Rest Of The Summer In Town
Retail isn't the only thing that's had momentum this month. Coalinga's National Night Out on August 4 gave away more than 550 school supply kits to local K through 12 students, run as a bingo-style event where kids visited booths hosted by local businesses and community groups to collect items for the new school year. It's the kind of event that doesn't make it into retail coverage but says something about the same civic energy behind the Polk Street corridor, a town investing in itself in more than one direction at once.
Looking ahead, the Chamber of Commerce's annual CoalingaFest returns in October, one of the handful of events, alongside the Horned Toad Derby over Memorial Day weekend and the Fourth of July celebration, that anchor the community calendar year to year. If you're new to town or just haven't made it out before, it's worth putting on the calendar alongside whatever eventually shows up next on Polk Street.
The corner at Polk and Elm isn't finished changing. Ross is open, Tractor Supply has been open for two years, and two more names are still somewhere between announcement and opening day. That's not a story about a deal falling apart. It's a story about how long it actually takes for a small Central Valley town's retail map to redraw itself, one building at a time, on a schedule nobody outside the companies gets to set.
If you're watching Coalinga's growth from the outside and wondering what that means for buying or selling a home here, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these changes as they happen. Golden Hills Real Estate works this market every day. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk about what it means for you.
