City needs to remember it's not paying the piper

Big box shock? Pardon us, but we don’t find it shocking at all that national chain discounters, operating on a high-volume, low-margin basis, would be looking for McMinnville Landing building spaces in the 135,000-square-foot range.

We can understand wondering if McMinnville can actually attract and support three of them, even on the expansive 190-acre tract being prepped for development on its highly urbanized and heavily traveled Highway 18 corridor.

Currently, the third one carries tentative and conditional reserve status, and that sounds about right to us. Depending on how the development unfolds over the next few years, it might or might not prove both workable and desirable.

We could also see trying to hold its size minimum down a bit from the 135,000 currently set for the big two. But not much.

Big box retailers carry the “big box” label for a reason.

Newer Costcos are running upward of 150,000 square feet, and sometimes reaching 250,000 in major markets. Walmart Supercenters typically run 180,000 to 200,000, making Mac’s existing 100,000-square-foot store seem quaint and constrained in comparison.

For Target, the typical range these days is 135,000 to 150,000 square feet. For Fred Meyer, it’s 150,000 to 180,000, sometimes ranging up to 200,000.

If you limit building spaces in your community to 100,000 square feet or less, what you are really saying isn’t, “Please limit your ambitions here.” It’s, “Go find somewhere else to build. We don’t want you — or any of your competitors, for that matter.”

Cities can’t dictate store size. That’s a function of free market forces well beyond their control.

Why did Amazon recently build a five-story, 3.8-million-square-foot warehouse in Woodburn? Because market needs demanded that gargantuan size — enough to encompass 25 full-service Costcos.

We feel similarly about efforts to ensure locals a shot at some of the satellite venues feeding off the big box anchor traffic. The reality is:

Even satellite stores in mega centers operate on a high-volume, low-margin basis, stocking a lowest-common denominator inventory designed to appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of a mass market. They have to in order to afford the rent.

In contrast, local merchants operate on a lower-volume, higher-margin basis with a more robust service quotient. That makes them better suited for quarters in the downtown core, adjacent Granary and Alpine districts, or Highway 99W corridor.

Square pegs don’t naturally fit in round holes. And if you grind them down to make them fit, they lose all the character that made them special in the first place.

Highway 99W may seem like the city’s neglected stepchild, with all the attention being focused elsewhere in recent years. But it features tire centers moving into a carpet store and possibly a bowling alley, an abandoned Izzy’s remodeled into a martial arts studio, a gas station turned into a food court, and former downtown vendors finding niches of their own at various points along its broad shoulders.

A free market left to its own devices can sometimes work its own brand of magic. If the city someday turns its redevelopment focus 99W’s direction, we hope it will do so with a light touch rather than a heavy hand.

Early on, Mayor Kim Morris sounded just such a caution with respect to McMinnville Landing. She warned against trying to impose too many restrictions on what is, after all, a project wholly dependent on private development.

“It needs to be profitable as well, otherwise it’s not going to happen,” she said. She observed, correctly in our view, “sometimes, we can go too far.”

There is, however, one area needing maximum city intervention: ensuring that whatever development occurs on that site not produce Highway 18 traffic flow levels that tend to destroy the essential bypass nature of that highway.

We see the city’s mission, with McMinnville Landing as well as its other like projects, as working with the development community on one hand and larger community on the other to establish a workable overall framework, then stepping back.

The ultimate goal should be striking a realistic balance between what’s possible and what’s simply not. The city won’t succeed if it falls into micromanaging mode.