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| Today's post highlights Shelby County, TN, retail, as well as that of Lee County, MS. |
For today's entry to the Lost Histories of Mid-South Retail series, the blog will be taking a look at the short-lived presence of Staples in Memphis. Despite having a fulfillment center in the Bluff City for a number of years, Staples never had an actual retail store locally... so in 2011, the self-proclaimed Office Superstore decided to change that. In January of that year, the Memphis Business Journal reported that Staples "could enter the Memphis market by the end of the year," and that the chain was looking at sites in "East Memphis, specifically the Ridgeway Trace development, as well as DeSoto County, Germantown, and the Wolfchase Galleria area."
The fact that a specific shopping center was identified in that article meant that Staples likely was far along in the process of looking to locate at that aforementioned Ridgeway Trace development. Sure enough, by February 25, 2011, Staples announced that they would soon be entering the Memphis market with "a 17,945 square foot lease at Ridgeway Trace, the shopping center at Poplar Avenue and Interstate 240 developed by Houston-based Weingarten Realty Investors," per the Memphis Daily News. That first store wound up with an address of 5851 Poplar Avenue. Below are a few captures of the store while under construction from Google Street View (in September 2011), as well as some additional photos of the store following its grand opening courtesy of various sources.
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| Courtesy Google Maps |
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| Courtesy Google Maps |
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| Courtesy Google Maps. Incidentally, I captured all of these screengrabs exactly one year ago, on July 4, 2017. Shows how long my blog posts spend in the development stages, haha! |
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| Grand opening day! Courtesy Yelp. |
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| Courtesy Collins and Arnold |
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| Courtesy LoopNet |
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| Courtesy LoopNet. Interestingly enough, the Carter's store you see on the left of this image was reportedly their first location in the Memphis market, too. |
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| Courtesy Yelp |
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| Ridgeway Trace shopping center signage, featuring Staples placard just above the base. Courtesy Yelp |
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| Courtesy ClearSky Images |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps. Here you can see how Staples managed to squeeze in-between Kohl's and the neighboring road. |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps. Not sure why the Staples logo backdrop looks so odd in this view. |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
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| Courtesy LoopNet |
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| Courtesy LoopNet |
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| Courtesy Yelp |
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| Courtesy RealtyLink |
If you're a Memphian or just a Mid-Southerner who visits the city frequently enough, you may remember these two stores. But what you probably don't know is that Staples - as mentioned previously - was initially planning to open a third Memphis location as well. In that same April 2011 article, the Memphis Business Journal reported that "Staples is also targeting the former Bookstar location [3402 Poplar Avenue] at Poplar Plaza, a 359,860-square-foot shopping center at Poplar and Highland, sources say. The Bookstar location, which is 18,200 square feet, has been vacant since January [2011] when the company's lease expired." Now that would have been an interesting conversion to see! There's enough to say about Bookstar to make it a subject for another day, but for the sake of this post, the short story is that its store was housed in what was once Memphis's Plaza Theatre, which dated back to 1952, and Bookstar kept much of the former cinema's traits intact, including the marquee on the exterior of the building. Seeing what Staples would have done to the place would surely have been a trip, but alas, it wasn't meant to be - it seems as if the negotiations never panned out. Instead, Osaka Japanese Restaurant wound up taking over the location in 2012, drastically altering the interior of the space (sadly) but ultimately keeping the exterior intact (thankfully).
So... that leaves us with just the two stores, one in Memphis proper and one in Cordova, both under construction in 2011. Based on the Google Street View images we saw earlier in this post showing the Ridgeway Trace store still being built in September of 2011, I'm not sure if either store even managed to open in the same calendar year. Why does that matter? Well, it makes all the difference for those of you who might be interested in counting the months to see just how short-lived Staples was in the Memphis market. Three years following those captures, in September of 2014, the Memphis Business Journal broke the news that Staples would soon exit the Memphis market with the closure of its two stores. "In March, Staples announced plans to close 225 stores nationwide to save $500 million," the article reads. The two Memphis stores may not have had ample time to prove themselves, but if sales were already trending low, or if the chain simply didn't want to spend additional money further expanding in the market in order to gain better market share against competitors Office Depot and OfficeMax (which had just recently combined at the time of the closure announcement, but were still separate entities when Staples first opened in the Memphis area), it makes sense that they would cut their losses and close their two stores. (That total of two stores pales in comparison to Office Depot's seven, the latter chain's total in the Memphis metro as of the time of this writing. Office Depot may have had even more stores open back in 2014, to boot.) "The Memphis-area store closures mean the nearest Staples will be in Tupelo," writes the MBJ. Both stores closed on October 11, 2014.
At this point in the post, it's time to dive into some more pictures... only this time, the majority of them will be looking at the stores post-closure. To start out, though, here are a few more Bird's Eye Views from Bing Maps, this time looking at the Ridgeway Trace store.
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
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| Courtesy Bing Maps |
Obviously, a post on some former stores isn't complete without some pictures of what they look like today. Once again, let's start with the Ridgeway Trace store, at 5851 Poplar. I visited this store for a brief photo blitz on January 4, 2018.
Here we are approaching the store. Despite being located in a popular shopping center with visibility from the nearby interstate, this former Staples has yet to find a permanent new tenant.
Moving a little closer to the storefront, we see more of Staples's signature red façade. Except where the red backdrop behind the Staples logo is typically horizontal grooves...
...here in East Memphis, the backdrop was comprised of sleek red tiles instead (a couple of which look to have been chipped or otherwise scarred when the Staples signage was removed). Below the backdrop is a similarly red-colored awning above the entrance/exit doors.
Peeking into the salesfloor from one of the front windows, it becomes clear that very little remains from Staples besides the carpeting on the floors. In this shot we're looking toward the center and left sides of the interior, with the entry vestibule visible on the right of the frame.
The windows on the right side of the storefront reveal the same story: inside, original Staples carpeting is still in place, but there's not much else to speak of. All of the décor and shelving units that this store once had likely left at the same time that Staples did in 2014.
Peering in through the centrally-located vestibule itself rather than the windows on either side of it didn't prove much better. In fact, all it seemed to capture was reflections from the outside, including one of myself, instead of any more of the store interior! There is *one* notable thing in this shot however, but I'll save discussion of that for a little later on in this post...
Turning our attention back to the exterior design detail with this close-up of the red logo backdrop area. No true labelscar is visible here, but you can definitely see the damage done to the red tiles from the signage removal.
I thought these bollards out on the sidewalk in front of the store were interesting. The thinner parts of them are all painted red - another thing to identify this store as a former Staples. This was the case at the Cordova store as well, and many other Staples stores out there, I would imagine. (It just depends on how long this has been a practice.)
Another look at the façade, this time from a slightly different angle than we've seen so far. There wasn't that awful much to photograph here, but I still wanted to be sure I thoroughly documented the little bit that was still present.
Zoomed out a little bit more on the storefront, as we retreat farther back into the parking lot. I thought this particular store looked very nice and classy, what with the white, almost-marble-looking blocks and the different varieties of brick. It's a shame that whoever eventually moves into this space (surely something will move in...!) would likely completely remodel this façade, but at least we still get to enjoy it for now!
Finally, here's a wide view capturing the entirety of the store's exterior. Note the "Available" lease sign in that window to the left of the doors. According to the shopping center's current lease plan, this is the only major vacancy remaining in Ridgeway Trace, besides a similarly-sized empty space in the right half of the plaza's former Sports Authority. (The left half is currently being remodeled into the Memphis area's first REI store.)
Let's hop over to the Cordova store now, at 2321 N Germantown Parkway. Unlike my above photos of the East Memphis Staples, the following images all come from various sources besides myself.
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| Courtesy Yelp |
Here we see the storefront post-closure...
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| ...Despite what I wrote above, turns out I did take this one myself after all :P |
...and here, the left side of the building, where the secondary Staples logo was once stationed. (Or should I say, stationary? XD Get it? "Stationery"? Office supplies? Okay, I'll show myself the door.) I thought it was pretty cool how closely these two pics matched the two shown earlier in this post, taken while this store was still open.
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| Courtesy Google Maps |
Google Street View unfortunately never passed by this store while it was open, but it does have this view of the vacant building, captured in April 2017. Surprisingly, it looks like Staples's closure notices may actually have stayed posted to the windows that entire time.
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
Speaking of Staples's closure notices, here's a close-up of one such poster, as photographed by l_dawg2000 in November 2014, shortly after both Memphis stores closed for good. I like how he described this location: "an afterthought tacked onto the side of the Wolfchase-area Kohl's, which was built several years before." He continues: "Three short years after being constructed this Staples was done, along with the other Memphis location at Poplar and I-240. Both locations closed in October 2014."
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
l_dawg took this shot peeking in through the vestibule of the store, but unfortunately - as with my similar view at the Ridgeway Trace location - glare and reflections reduce our visibility of the interior. Nevertheless, it's still clear enough to tell that this store was gutted just the same as the other one, with only the carpet remaining.
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
l_dawg's final shot of the closed Cordova Staples is this exterior view, fittingly taken in the rain. Unlike the East Memphis store, I believe I can make out a Staples labelscar here! Also worth noting is that this store is a bit more traditional for a Staples, in that the red logo backdrop has that normal horizontal grooved look here. This store also has a much heavier brick design, likely to match the Kohl's next door (reference the aerial views included earlier in this post). Both stores have nice exterior designs; I can't decide which I like better.
I visited the Cordova store a couple of months after the East Memphis one, on March 3rd, 2018. I didn't photograph it as extensively...
For better or for worse, Overstock appears to be only a temporary tenant in the former stores that they inhabit, based on the lone article about them that I was able to dig up online. Strangely, it seems as if this "chain" is present in multiple areas of the country, but they have a very minimal online presence: no Yelp or Google Maps pages, no website, no news articles, no reviews, no nothing. I first discovered them locally in December 2017, operating out of two former hhgreggs - one in Southaven, and one in the Commons at Wolfcreek shopping center in Memphis - as well as this former Staples in Cordova... but I have no way of knowing exactly when they first "infiltrated" the area. The Wolfcreek location has since closed (likely because it was just down the road from this Cordova store), but the other two remain open - and who knows, maybe they'll stay for a long time, as demand for both of the remaining locations doesn't seem to be that awful high right now. Not the worst fate for this former Cordova Staples by any means, but I can't help but feel that the signage (well, banner) and overall concept is somewhat cheap and gimmicky.
Not to be outdone, the former Ridgeway Trace Staples has gotten itself a new tenant as well - but its is even more temporary than Cordova's, believe it or not!
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| Courtesy Yelp |
Yep, as you can see above, Spirit Halloween uses the Staples shell to set up shop every October. (...And for a few months before and after the holiday itself, of course. Got to have enough time for pre-sales and clearance, respectively!)
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| Courtesy Google Maps |
The earliest Yelp review for Spirit Halloween at this location is from 2015, which makes sense - that was the first year the space would have been available for a Spirit Halloween store's typical operating season, after closing in October 2014. Spirit has operated here every year from 2015 onward. This is also what I was alluding to earlier in this post, at that picture taken through the vestibule of this store: in that shot, you could see a sticker of a skeleton hand left over from one of Spirit's previous tenures.
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| Courtesy Google Maps |
This and the previous shot both allow us to see the interior of the store during the Spirit Halloween months, courtesy of Jason Boyd, who uploaded the photo to Google Maps in 2017. Again, nothing remains from Staples besides the carpeting, but I thought that including some interior views *not* taken through the windows for once would be welcome.
For completeness... I quoted the Memphis Business Journal earlier in the post as saying that the next-closest Staples store, after the two in Memphis closed, was to be in Tupelo, Mississippi, a nearly two-hour drive away. Since it's the only other Staples I know of to have operated within the Mid-South (unless any of you readers are aware of any others; please let me know in the comments, if so!), I decided to research it, too, just for kicks.
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| Courtesy BizBuzz |
The good news: I found the above photo in a BizBuzz article by Dennis Seid. The bad news: I found the above photo in a BizBuzz article by Dennis Seid that was announcing this store's closure. As it turns out, Tupelo's Staples would bite the bullet not long after Memphis's two stores, closing for good on July 11, 2015, nine months to the day of the Memphis locations.
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| Courtesy LoopNet |
I found this image on LoopNet, showing the Tupelo store (and its neighbor, PetSmart) in better days. According to Mr. Seid, this store measured just shy of 24,000 square feet, and opened in February 2001. So while the store closed down not even a year after its Memphis counterparts, it did actually predate said Memphis stores by a decade - the chain had nowhere near as short of a presence, then, in Tupelo as it did up in Shelby County.
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| Courtesy BizBuzz |
Some additional images were posted to the BizBuzz blog the day before the store was to close for good. In these shots, you can see the closure signs posted on the store's windows. As Seid writes, "Employees have been telling customers that the lease has expired and the store is not renewing its lease," but no one would confirm whether or not "the closure is related to Staples' announcement in March 2014 [that] it would close 225 stores by the end of 2015." Suspicious timing indeed if the closure was not related to that announcement, but then again, a lease expiration is a lease expiration...
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| Courtesy BizBuzz |
Here's a close-up of the closing signs in the window, which are identical to the ones we saw earlier in this post, courtesy of l_dawg2000, at the Cordova location - perhaps the identical style places this store's closure among those 225 after all, or perhaps Staples has simply always used this design for its store closures. Again, unfortunately it seems like there is no way for us to know for sure whether this store was part of a mass exodus or if it was just a one-off closure. In any case, what we do know is that it represented Staples's exit from the Mid-South as a whole, following its exit from the Memphis metro mere months prior. In fact, it also looks like this may have been Staples's last location in the state of Mississippi, too. Ouch.
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| Courtesy Google Maps |
You could tell that this particular store was older than the ones in Memphis, in that its exterior was chock full of that "red horizontal grooves" look. The subscript "The Office Superstore" below the main Staples logo itself also helped to date the store. In this Google Street View from August 2016, we see that after Staples vacated, as with the Memphis stores, nothing was altered on the exterior. Get this, though: apparently Overstock Furniture & Mattress did business in this Tupelo location, too! I'm not sure when Overstock would have started business here, or likewise, when they would have ceased it. But I thought that this was a pretty interesting coincidence nonetheless!
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| Courtesy BizBuzz |
For all I know, Overstock might like to be doing business in this spot even today, but their nature as a temporary tenant meant that the arrival of a new, permanent suitor for this store took precedence. And as you may be able to guess from the blue paint job given to Staples's formerly red façade, that new tenant is none other than Goodwill! This will actually be Tupelo's very first full-line Goodwill store, as a matter of fact. (The town does have a Goodwill Bookstore and a Goodwill Donation Center, but has never had a true Goodwill retail store, reportedly.) This news again came per Dennis Seid's BizBuzz; he reports that the new Goodwill should open either later this month or sometime next month (July or August 2018). The former Tupelo Staples was located at 1046 Cross Creek Drive, within the Cross Creek Shopping Center near The Mall at Barnes Crossing.
For the home stretch of this post... l_dawg2000 was kind enough to dig in his archives and rediscover these photos he had taken on the morning of October 5, 2013. As it turns out, not only had he taken a trip to the Cordova store after its closure (as we saw earlier in this post), he also visited the East Memphis store back during normal operations... and he took some interior pictures, no less! As a result, I'm excited and grateful to be able to share these photos with you guys - the only known images of a Memphis Staples store's interior. (Most of the following shots come from l_dawg, besides a few more that I was able to find on Foursquare.)
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
Here's the exterior of the Ridgeway Trace store; this, we've seen before. (I was actually quite surprised by the number of exterior pics of this location that I was able to find and include earlier in this post, as a matter of fact!) But it's what follows that's so rare...
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
Without further ado, let's step inside! This shot was taken from within the store's entry vestibule, looking toward the Staples copy and print shop. This area occupied the front right corner of the building.
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| Courtesy Foursquare |
This shot, one of the ones I found on Foursquare, shows a UPS ad placed within the entrance of the store, as soon as you step in from the vestibule. But I included it mainly because of what you can see in the background: the copy and print shop on the right, and some aisles beginning off to the left. Note also the half-wall just next to the ad, which features a blue stripe decorated with office-related words. This décor can also be seen in l_dawg's vestibule pic.
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
From analyzing l_dawg's interior shots, as best as I can tell we've jumped to the rear of the salesfloor for this pic, and are looking over towards the back right corner of the store. The orientation of the aisles was key to figuring this out: the aisles in this store appear to have been set up parallel to the front wall. Aisles 1-11 ran along the right side of the interior, numbered from front to back; while Aisles 12-18 ran along the left side of the building, continuing the numbering from back to front. In the center of the store...
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
...were some shorter, unnumbered aisles, home to larger and/or more specialty-type merchandise, such as the printer department shown here. Off in the distance you can see the copy and print shop again, so for this shot l_dawg was still standing somewhere near the back of the store, on its left side.
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
This shot looks up toward the front left corner, home to Staples's tech support center, and shows aisles 15-18, home to items such as cameras, MP3 players, and computer software. I guess the "MP3 Players" sign helps us confirm this store's 2011 opening, lol! Against the left-side wall, visible on the right of this shot, are ink cartridges.
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| Courtesy Foursquare |
Here's a close-up of the signage for Staples's "easytech" tech support center, this shot once again courtesy of a Foursquare user. I like how the "E" in "easy" is actually a tilted power button icon (just like the "L" in Staples is meant to emulate a staple). I think the rest of the sign is kinda awkward, though, what with the tight spacing for "easy" but loose spacing for "tech." That "Y" is throwing me off too, given how plain the font choice for the rest of the letters looks.
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
Digressions aside, here's another of l_dawg's photos, this one looking up toward the front wall of the store, with some more of the centrally-located departments in the foreground. The copy and print shop - which was my anchor in determining the overall layout of this store! - is once again visible on the left of the shot, with some signage for the customer service counter joining it just beyond the vestibule windows.
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
We're looking from aisle 17 (on the left side of the store) in this view, on over to the right-side wall, with both the Computers & Tablets and Memory & Accessories departments occupying the aisles immediately in front of us, in the center portion of the salesfloor. I think it's interesting how, despite their predominately-red color scheme, Staples's department signage instead utilizes a lime green color (or at least, it did back in 2011, when this store was built). Not saying I don't like it, though. In fact, I think it looks pretty snazzy!
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
Similar to the previous one, this shot also looks to have been taken within aisle 17, only now we're looking across the preceding aisles all the way towards the store's back wall. Copy paper lines the majority of said wall (and actually makes for quite a colorful display, in my opinion!), while out in front of it, you can see a display for - of all things! - Martha Stewart Home Office products. I had no idea that those were a thing... Staples's furniture department also is back that way, as evidenced by the "Chairs" sign (on aisle 12). Not sure how extensive their selection was, compared to Office Depot or OfficeMax.
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| Courtesy Foursquare |
The checkouts are the one thing I'm having trouble placing within the salesfloor. As best as I can tell, they must have been located directly in front of the vestibule between the entry doors and the easytech counter, although that doesn't make much sense for them to have been right in front of you as you walk inside the store. In any case, they were definitely located up at the front of the building, as you would expect!
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| Courtesy l_dawg2000 |
Finally, along the front wall, we have the traditional "thanks for shopping" sign, below which is also a "Staples soul" community action/charity poster. The little heart icon is made to look like a bent paperclip - again, I like the creativity here! And of course, who can forget Staples's longtime slogan, visible here on the wall underneath the chain's logo...
..."that was easy"! As it happens, l_dawg2000 wasn't the only one ever to visit that Ridgeway Trace Staples; I simply wasn't into retail photography at the time :P I only visited the store once, but being the advertising and memorabilia geek that I am, I didn't leave without first purchasing a coveted, iconic Staples Easy Button (which I am now even happier to own as a memento, considering how short-lived the Memphis Staples stores were!). Shown here is the base of the button, adorned with the Staples logo.
I took this shot of the underside of the Easy Button, in case any of you might be interested in looking at it. I was hoping for a date to be printed on here, but unfortunately I had no such luck. (Oh, and just because of the irony of the matter, I have to tell you guys that in order to get this shot, I had the button propped up against a staple remover :P )
Finally, here's the top side of my Easy Button. This thing still works like a charm (knock on wood!), and I'm proud to say that it sits on my desk to this day :) And you can bet that I'm gonna press it as soon as I hit publish on this post, haha!
I hope you all enjoyed this chronicle covering the lost history of the former Staples stores in both Memphis and Tupelo! The Memphis stores in particular were so short-lived that it's very possible to forget them, if you even noticed them in the first place (kind of a "blink or you'll miss it" situation with those two, really)... so I wanted to ensure that they had proper documentation with this blog post. If you have any photos, memories, or other information to share about any or all of these stores, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below or email me at midsouthretailblog [at] gmail [dot] com! Stay tuned for another post later this month (if all goes as planned, that is)... and until then, as always, have fun exploring the retail world wherever you are!
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