With demolition of Pine Ridge Mall in sight, local business owners are looking elsewhere

CHUBBUCK – With the demolition of Chubbuck’s only enclosed shopping mall approaching, its local tenants are still figuring out what’s in store for their businesses.

Although the new owners of the Pine Ridge Mall haven’t announced the official date when they will demolish the old building, they plan to close the mall at the end of May. SimonCRE, a commercial real estate firm, closed on a deal to buy the mall in May of last year and quickly released plans to turn it into an “open-air retail center.”

While this new development is bringing businesses to the area that many people have been asking for years, like Target, it will also bring fewer retail units and increased rent prices for the Pine Ridge Mall’s existing tenants. And although some of mall’s franchise tenants, like Deseret Book and Buckle, can afford to join the Pine Ridge redevelopment, the mall’s local business owners we talked to cannot.

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“For a local business, it’s just not logical. As much as I would like to say, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ we’re just not a big corporation that has the money,” said Nathan Naasz, who co-owns multiple businesses in the mall with his partner, Dillon Laird.

Naasz and Laird own Knots & Nibbles, Gem State Gaming and Tech Repair, and Jump In, which includes The Battle Zone.

Neither Naasz nor Laird are aware of any local businesses that will be a part of the Pine Ridge Mall redevelopment. EastIdahoNews.com could not find any local businesses planning to sign a new lease either, and none of the business owners EastIdahoNews.com spoke to have secured new locations. They are still looking for retail spaces elsewhere that meet their needs.

Josh Simon, founder of SimonCRE, said the mall’s current tenants have been paying “extremely low rents.” He also said that construction costs have gone up by 50% in the last four years.

Local owners in the mall are responding to the redevelopment in a variety of ways.

Josh Argueta, owner of FadeawayJ Barbershop, is looking for retail space in town. When he went over the plans for the mall redevelopment, he found that all of the available space would be too large and too expensive for his barbershop.

“It wasn’t really an option for me,” Argueta said.

Ross Gregersen, owner of Aquatic Oasis, has launched a GoFundMe to support the business’s move to a new location, after hearing the idea from enough of his customers. As of Friday morning, the fundraiser had raised $1,375 of its $2,400 goal.

“It’s a hard thing for someone to ask other people to help that way, but I had a good number of people coming into the store and suggesting it,” Gregersen said.

Gregersen opened Aquatic Oasis two years ago, and it sells not just freshwater fish and tanks, but also saltwater reefing tanks, which allow people to grow their own coral. For a niche hobby, he saw the Pine Ridge Mall as a perfect location to open up shop.

“The mall is busier than people thought. You come in here, and you think it’s slow, but if I was to be somewhere off in town as a new business … I would have to rely on direct traffic, people intentionally coming to my store,” Gregersen said.

Naasz and Laird echoed this statement, saying the mall was busier than most people realized.

“You’ve got the younger crowd that wants to spend time in the indoor mall. Actually, we see a lot of more younger people,” Naasz said.

The co-owners believe that enclosed shopping malls could make a comeback.

There has been some research to back this up.

“The US mall is not dying,” according to a CNN Business article from 2023, which quoted a market analysis that showed foot traffic in both top-tier and lower-tier malls were up by 12% and 10%, respectively, in 2022 compared to 2019.

The article also cited 2023 data which said that 73% of Gen Z shoppers said they visited a mall in the past month, while 65% of Millenials and 48% of Gen X respondents said the same.

But Simon doesn’t see enclosed shopping malls as viable.

“If you think about … the cost of building fully enclosed, the amount of stores you need, the cost to operate, when you think of utilities, additional area to air condition and heat, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Simon said.

Simon sees outdoor shopping centers as the new standard.

“I’m sure there’ll be something built that has an indoor component, depending on where the climate is, but I just don’t see an indoor mall being built, really, just anywhere in the country. There might be one or two exceptions over the next decade or two. All the malls will be open air, outdoor shopping centers,” Simon said.

Naasz and Laird said that their goal with their businesses was to provide an experience where people could come to the mall for a “community center.”

“People come here, there’s fun zones, there’s places for kids to go that’s indoors. … We wanted to kind of make it so … it was just something that’s more of a community center. It’s for Pocatello and Chubbuck,” Naasz said.

Naasz and Laird wanted people to know that local businesses are still in the mall.

“The biggest thing I want everyone to know is we’re still here till the end of May, so come and support your local businesses,” Laird said. “Show support to everyone that you possibly can, because we have plans to try and stay open if we can find a place to go.”

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