For well over a year, the old Marketplace Foods building at Westridge Center sat there half-used, its parking lot too big for the little bit of activity happening at one end of it. Anyone who drove Paul Bunyan Drive regularly got used to the sight: a grocery-store-shaped hole in a shopping center that otherwise stayed busy.
That hole is gone now. But if you assumed another supermarket would eventually take the space, you'd have been wrong. What actually happened is stranger and, for anyone paying attention to how small-market retail works, more interesting: one grocery store became four completely different specialty shops, filled in one at a time over a year and a half, while the grocery piece of the building went to the smallest tenant of all.
The Building That Sat Half-Lit for a Year
Marketplace Foods closed on Aug. 21, 2024, leaving a large gap in the Westridge Center. Lueken's Village Foods stepped in, but only for the attached gas station and convenience store, the smallest footprint in the whole complex. The main grocery floor, the part shoppers actually walked through with carts, sat empty.
That gap mattered because Westridge isn't a struggling center. TJ Maxx has anchored it for years, and the parking lot rarely looks abandoned. A vacant grocery box in a functioning shopping center tends to get filled fast in most markets. Here, it took until September 2025 for anyone to say publicly what would happen to it, when Randy Jaeger, president and CEO of JND Holdings, confirmed that leases had been signed for four separate retail spaces carved out of the old grocery footprint.
One Grocery Store, Split Four Ways
The rollout wasn't simultaneous. It moved store by store, and the order tells its own story about what a national retailer is willing to risk in a market the size of Bemidji.
| Date | What Happened |
|---|---|
| Aug. 21, 2024 | Marketplace Foods closes; Lueken's Village Foods takes over the attached gas station and convenience store only |
| September 2025 | Four leases confirmed for the vacated grocery floor: Maurices, Bath & Body Works, Ulta Beauty, and Sierra |
| November 2025 | Maurices opens, relocated from the Paul Bunyan Mall |
| March 28, 2026 | Sierra holds its ribbon-cutting, a 20,000-square-foot store, its first Bemidji location |
| May 1, 2026 | Ulta Beauty opens, also new to Bemidji |
| Still pending | Bath & Body Works has not yet relocated from its Paul Bunyan Mall storefront, as of the most recent reporting this spring |
Jaeger had told the Bemidji Pioneer back in September that one of the four would open before year's end and the rest by early spring. Maurices hit that first mark. Sierra landed right on the early-spring target. Ulta slipped into May instead, which is a small enough gap that nobody in Bemidji seems to have minded, but it's a reminder that even confirmed timelines for a project like this tend to drift by weeks, not because anything went wrong, but because build-outs for four different national retailers rarely finish on the same clock.
Why a Grocery Store Turned Into a Beauty Counter and an Outdoor Outfitter
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only clock the store names as they appear: Bemidji didn't need another grocery store in that spot. Lueken's already runs a North and a South location in town, both busy enough that the fairgrounds use them as ticket outlets during fair week. When Marketplace Foods closed, the town's grocery capacity barely moved. What actually opened up was square footage that a national specialty chain could use to test a market it had never tried before.
That's exactly what Sierra and Ulta Beauty did. Neither had a Bemidji location before this year. Sierra, which started in 1986 as a Reno, Nevada catalog company before moving to Cheyenne and eventually being folded into TJX Companies, the same parent that runs TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, and Homesense, already had a built-in reason to bet on this particular shopping center. TJ Maxx has operated at Westridge for years. Landing next to a sibling brand that already knows the local customer is a lower-risk way to open your first store in a market this size.
Store manager Aaron Bullie framed the opening in terms that sounded less like a corporate press release and more like someone who'd actually been in town cutting the ribbon.
"Thank you all for being here today, what an incredible way to kick off the grand opening of Sierra. It truly means a lot to welcome you into a store that our team has worked so hard to bring to life."
Sierra associates also handed over a donation to the Bemidji Community Food Shelf as part of the opening, accepted by executive director Jennifer Aakre, a detail that says something about how these grand openings tend to land here. They're treated as community events, not just retail launches.
Maurices and Bath & Body Works are a different case entirely. Both already had a Bemidji presence, just across town at the Paul Bunyan Mall. Their move to Westridge isn't a new bet on the market. It's a relocation, and that distinction matters for the next part of this story.
What This Means for the Paul Bunyan Mall
Two of the four Westridge storefronts are direct pulls from the mall. That's not a small thing for a shopping center that's leaned on mall-style anchors for decades. Maurices left its Paul Bunyan Mall spot for the newly built-out Westridge space in November. Bath & Body Works is set to follow, moving in next door to Maurices whenever its build-out finishes.
The mall isn't hollowing out because of it. Earlier this year, the Bemidji Area Chamber of Commerce Ambassadors welcomed L&J Café, a new family-owned restaurant, into the Paul Bunyan Mall, so tenants are still choosing that location too. But the pattern is worth naming plainly: when a national retailer wants a bigger footprint, better sightlines from Paul Bunyan Drive, or space next to a sister brand like TJ Maxx, it's choosing the open-air strip format at Westridge over the enclosed mall layout it used to prefer. That's not unique to Bemidji. It's happening in small cities across the Midwest. What is unique is watching it play out through two specific storefronts you can drive past on the same afternoon.
The One Storefront Still Waiting
As of the most recent word on the project this spring, Bath & Body Works hadn't yet made the move from the mall. No firm date had been announced. Given how the rest of the rollout has gone, a few weeks past whatever target gets floated wouldn't be surprising. The building has effectively told its own timeline over the past year and a half: something opens, the community shows up, and the next one follows a season or two later.
For anyone who's lived near Westridge long enough to remember when that whole stretch of building was one grocery store, the current version says something about how this market absorbs change. Nobody built a new structure. Nobody added parking. A single vacancy got sorted into four uses that better match what people in Bemidji were already driving elsewhere to buy, an outdoor gear run out of town, a beauty aisle trip that used to mean a longer drive. Now it's a stop on Paul Bunyan Drive instead.
If you've been watching Westridge fill in and found yourself wondering what that kind of retail investment says about property values in the surrounding area, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this market closely. The W Group keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local shift. Request your free home valuation from Wendy Steinmetz and find out what it means for a home near this corridor.
