SEQUIM — The city’s newest large chain store, Ross Dress For Less, opens Saturday morning with children from the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula on hand.
The reason: Ross Dress For Less is donating $1,000 to the club based in Sequim and with a Port Angeles satellite.
“We’re going to be at the ribbon-cutting, and several kids will be cutting the ribbon, and I’ll be there, too,” said Mary Budke, Boys & Girls Clubs executive director.
The grand opening of the 27,690-square-foot store that will employ 40 takes place at 9 a.m.
The Ross store at 1055 W. Washington St. is part of a new $4.5 million commercial project that includes a still-to-be-completed Grocery Outlet store in Sequim Village Market Place.
The Sequim Ross store, which will be managed by Mike Lusk, is one of four opening Saturday in the region, said Gary Cribb, executive vice president of stores and loss prevention for Ross.
Other stores opening are in Lake Forest Park, Redmond and Burien.
“In honor of our dedication to the Seattle community, I also am pleased to announce that Ross Stores is making a donation of $1,000 each to four local Boys & Girls Club chapters,” Cribb said.
Ross operates 25 other locations in the state.
The 7.61-acre site of Ross and Grocery Outlet is between The Home Depot and Costco Wholesale.
Finish work on the interior and exterior of the 17,784-square-foot Grocery Outlet store adjoining Ross is still under way.
Down the street, Walmart is adding a 35,577-square-foot grocery store to the west side of the existing 113,000-square-foot Walmart store off West Washington Street at Priest Road.
The Walmart grocery store project, plus a remodeling of the existing Walmart store, is valued at $3.8 million, city documents show.
The addition and remodeling will in effect match the Walmart Supercenter that opened earlier this year east of Port Angeles on U.S. Highway 101 at Kolonels Way.
To celebrate the Ross opening, the store is offering customers a chance to win a $500 shopping spree or one of five $100 shopping sprees from Saturday to July 24.
The Ross store will be open from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sundays.
Ross Stores Inc., an S&P 500, Fortune 500 and Nasdaq 100 company based in Pleasanton, Calif., is the nation’s second-largest off-price retailer, with fiscal 2010 revenues of $7.9 billion.
The company operates more than 1,000 Ross Dress For Less and dd’s Discounts locations.
Additional information is available at www.rossstores.com.
The Ross and Grocery Outlet project has been under construction since early December.
The chain-link fence around the construction site was recently removed, opening up the landscaped and lighted parking lot.
No additional street access development will take place because traffic-related improvements were designed for long-term buildout, including two roundabouts along Washington Street at River Road and Ninth Avenue and a traffic signal at Priest Road, city officials said.
The Grocery Outlet, based in Berkeley, Calif., has more than 130 stores — 35 of them in Washington state — and calls itself an “extreme-value retailer” of food, beer, wine, toys and personal-care products.
It is not known how many jobs will be created at the Sequim Grocery Outlet.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
