The Dick’s Sporting Goods store at the Buckland Hills mall in Manchester is departing its current location and moving to a shopping plaza less than a mile away.
Adam Winstanley, a principal at Winstanley Enterprises, which co-owns the Plaza at Burr Corners, confirmed Friday that Dick’s had signed a lease at the shopping center and is set to move in later this year.
According to Adam Winstanley, Winstanley Enterprises bought a former Burr Corners tenant, Pilgrim Furniture & Mattress City, out of its lease and plans to combine the former furniture showroom with a space once occupied by a Planet Fitness gym to create a 55,000-square-foot store for Dick’s.
Pilgrim Furniture handed over its keys to the property Friday, he added, and reconstruction work is set to start immediately. Dick’s is expected to open its doors at the Plaza at Burr Corners around mid-October, in time for the holiday shopping season.
Neither Dick’s Sporting Goods nor the management at Buckland Hills mall responded to requests for comment on the move.
When asked why Dick’s Sporting Goods would want to vacate the mall — where it is an anchor tenant — and move such a short distance away, Adam Winstanley pointed to the changing economics of brick-and-mortar retail.
Malls were in decline even before the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, and outdoor shopping centers are now outperforming enclosed malls. In light of this trend, some large mall-based retailers have moved out, putting increased pressure on remaining tenants in the form of higher rents, which in turn leads to even more vacancies.
“It’s hard to fill a 150,000-square-foot box,” Adam Winstanley said of the massive mall units built for longtime anchor tenants such as Sears. “There’s no one entering the market now who can fill that much space.”
In Manchester specifically, Winstanley Enterprises has seen a shift in customer traffic away from Buckland Hills and toward open-air centers like the Plaza at Burr Corners.
“It used to be that you had to be near the mall,” Adam Winstanley said. “But now traffic is increasing below the mall and the area below the mall is actually doing better.”
