The Costco in Midtown Kansas City closes at the start of next month following a 25-year run, to reopen next year as a business center.
A Costco Business Center is basically the grocery section of a normal Costco on steroids. Eggs come in boxes of 15 dozen. Whole lambs and 50-pound bags of flour are on sale next to regular Costco staples like Kirkland peanut butter, maple syrup and olive oil. It will also have a better selection of office supplies and restaurant equipment.
Just about all the other Costco stuff is missing: no clothes, no pharmacy, no glasses, no hearing aids, no furniture, plants or tires. No wine, and no discount liquor.
And the Costco food court, with its $1.50 hot dog and a drink special dating back to the 1980s, will be gone.
The business center will keep selling gasoline; in fact, gas sales will go on while the store is closed and expand for the switchover.
The new store will offer deliveries and keep earlier hours.
Costco officially announced the closure and transformation in May. Neighborhood groups tried to stop it, but the city didn’t have any leverage.
The Costco and adjacent Home Depot were built with more than $50 million in public tax breaks, but the Midtown Marketplace development was successful enough to pay back that investment ahead of schedule. More than $6 million in sales tax revenue was diverted to support housing near the stores.
It’s unusual for Costco to convert one of its normal locations into a Business Center. Normally the company builds them from scratch, typically in the suburbs. The remaining Kansas City area Costcos are fanned out across suburban locations, all about half an hour from Midtown.
Costco employees, not authorized to speak for the company, say that sales were never as strong as the company wanted at the Midtown store. Liquor sales, they say, have been a different story, with the liquor section dwarfing the sales of entire large liquor stores in town and ringing up more in sales than any but one or two Costcos in the Midwest.
The store is already winding down. While many items appear fully stocked, the wine selection is dropping fast, and space on the elevated shelves around the store is increasingly empty.
The Midtown Costco closes at 6:00 on Thursday, Oct. 1st. Not coincidentally, a new Costco opens the very next day in Lee’s Summit, 15 miles away.
