SIOUX CITY — The Sioux City metro area is benefiting from Casey’s General Stores' recent aggressive efforts to build more stores and refurbish existing locations.
The Ankeny, Iowa-based chain recently opened a 4,475-square-foot store at 3731 Hamilton Blvd. to replace a 32-year-old store that was roughly 1,800 square feet, according to James Pastillo, vice president of accounting and treasurer of Casey’s General Stores Inc.
Pastillo said the company wanted to build a newer and larger store on Hamilton to ensure customers in that area were getting Casey’s full slate of offerings, which includes sub stations, coffee bars and larger cooler door space in addition to its signature pizza.
“The more products you offer to the consumer, the more choices they have and they tend to like that and that’s good,” he said. “We liked the location that we were in on Hamilton, but we wanted to put our better foot forward and make sure that we were serving the community as well as we could.”
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In recent years, Casey's has replaced aging stores on Floyd Boulevard, Lewis Boulevard and Gordon Drive with modernized and larger stores.
Sioux City isn’t the only part of the metro area to benefit from Casey’s efforts to modernize or expand its portfolio, which includes more than 1,900 locations in 14 Midwestern states.
In December, the company purchased a four-acre lot in North Sioux City for $3.2 million to build a mega store off of Interstate 29. The property at 100 South Derby Lane was home to the former Ike's Bingo & Casino, which will be demolished to make way for the 5,246-square-foot Casey’s.
“It will be our largest in the region for sure,” Pastillo said. “We have built one other like that and are looking at that model as one of the models we’ll be building on a go-forward basis.”
The new complex will boast six fueling stations for standard vehicles and four for semi-trailer trucks, according to documents filed with the city.
“It’s going to have everything that all of our other stores have, but nothing that is terribly unusual about it,” Pastillo said. “Just going to be a larger footprint, basically.”
Pastillo said the company has not yet released the North Sioux City store to construction, but said it takes about six months to build a store once that process has been completed.
Casey's previously operated a smaller store in North Sioux City. The site for the new larger store was acquired from the McCook Lake chapter of the Izaak Walton League, which opened the bingo hall in the 1950s. Video lottery machines were later added after South Dakota approved that form of gambling. Ike's closed in the summer of 2015.
Additionally, the company says its fiscal 2017 goals are to build or acquire 77 to 116 stores, replace 35 existing stores, and complete 100 major remodels of existing stores. One of those projects will take place in George, Iowa, a little more than an hour north of Sioux City, where a replacement store is being built.
Pastillo said Casey’s is in growth mode, and a large part of that is due to the nation’s fourth-largest convenience store chain opening a second distribution center in Terre Haute, Indiana, last year. Prior to that, the chain only had one distribution center in Ankeny that served all its stores.
