When doors opened in 2006 at the Walmart Supercenter in Waukegan, a healthy crowd waited at the door to rush inside for things like collector-grade Hot Wheels tucked inside the 203,000-square-foot complex, which was touted as nearly twice the size of Walmarts that opened in Round Lake Beach and Gurnee during the George H. W. Bush years.
When Lake County’s first Meijer opened in 2016 on Rollins Road in Round Lake Beach, a friend who checked it out during the first week of operation said she wanted to live amid the 192,940 square feet of groceries, clothing, sporting goods and electronics. She was only partially joking.
And now western Lake County has been granted a Woodman’s Market, which at a reported 244,000 square feet covers more than 5.5 acres, making it only slightly smaller than its host community of Lakemoor. That statement is also only partially in jest.
After a rather lengthy construction phase around the roaring intersection of routes 12 and 120 — work that included the installation of new turn lanes that run longer than some residential streets — the doors to this Lakemoor Woodman’s opened earlier this month, looking to attract consumers who don’t want to make the long haul to the Kenosha Woodman’s, much less the one just barely on the Lake County side of Buffalo Grove.
According to a recent story in the Wisconsin State Journal about Woodman’s 100th anniversary in the grocery game, the Lakemoor location is the 18th outlet for the Janesville-based company. Forty years ago, Woodman’s opened its first “superstore” in Madison, Wis. — “super” at that time being 90,000 square feet.
The 2019 version of a Woodman’s is so immense that it will take you two minutes and 49 seconds — if an iPhone stopwatch can be trusted — to walk from one end of the store to the other, and that is if you’re outside and not impeded by slow-moving shoppers.
If you park in the farthest parking space on the property’s west end, it will take you nearly 90 seconds to stroll to the nearest entrance, again at a modest but not-chased-by-wolves pace.
Indeed, it would seem that part of the adventure of shopping at the modern-day Roman Colosseum-sized marketplaces is that you can also burn off breakfast while doing so.
Once inside the new Woodman’s, those who have been to the Kenosha store — which, at 252,000 square feet, is touted at the company’s website as having been “the largest grocery store in the United States when it opened” in 1997 — will be familiar with the football-field rows of frozen foods and the liquor department that, taken alone, is the size of a 20th-century Butera or Piggly Wiggly.
In keeping with the company’s business model of offering lower prices in bulk form, many items are offered in bags taller than a toddler. Try not to gasp when you see a 12-foot-tall wall of toilet paper arranged in such a way that the word “LAKEMOOR” is spelled out for the world to know.
Yes, there are off-brand offerings sitting alongside the big names, especially in the cereal aisle, which includes duffel bags of Cocoa Puffs by another name. But brand names are not only available, they are arranged in one row dedicated to Kellogg’s and Post and an entirely different one to General Mills.
Woodman’s might look to be the biggest of the big dogs, but it does stick to one universal industry standard: If you want to buy milk, you have to navigate through the entire store to the back corner to get it. They also give you a range of per-gallon prices that look to compete with not only the aforementioned Meijer and Walmart but also Aldi in making sure that at least one variation is in the $1.80 range, though you can blow $3 on Dean’s if you insist.
Once outside with your purchases, an accompanying gas station along Route 12 also looks to offer a below-market price. On Tuesday, the per-gallon cost for basic unleaded was $2.69, while some gas stations on the west side of the county went up above the evil $3 threshold following last weekend’s misadventure in Saudi Arabia.
Who knows what those gas prices might be come this weekend, but one thing is a safer bet: If you plan to shop at this new kid on the local retail block, doing so on a Saturday afternoon or pregame Sunday morning might very well encounter crowds like those at a new Great America thrill ride.
But don’t be discouraged if traffic off Route 12 backs up on your grocery run. Competition is still a rule of thumb in economics, and someone somewhere — maybe Sam’s Club, maybe Costco — might have big-box designs on western Lake County that they’re just itching to turn into reality.
