Is Sedalia The Right Kind of Town For A New Five Below Store?

Recently, our friend Rick at the Best of Sedalia Facebook page suggested that Sedalia could get a Five Below store because the company is coming to Pittsburg, Kansas, which has a slightly smaller population than Sedalia. I thought this was an interesting topic to explore. Please keep reading to find out what I learned.

For those unfamiliar with Five Below, it is a value retailer offering high-quality products loved by tweens, teens, and even adults. Most items are priced between $1 and $5, but the Five Beyond Shop also has some extreme-value items priced beyond $5.  

First, here are Five Below's criteria for opening a new store. Five Below states, "Our requirements for real estate are a minimum of 8,000 square feet (will consider range from 8,000 to 10,000 square feet) and frontage minimum of 55'. Focused on regional shopping center locations with multiple national anchors & junior anchor cotenants."

The good news is that Sedalia does have properties where a Five Below store would work. The challenge is that Five Below focuses on regional shopping center locations.

First National Realty Partners defines a regional shopping center as having 400,000 to 800,000 square feet of leasable space and two anchor tenants. In many cases, it's also an indoor mall.

I asked ChatGPT if Sedalia had a shopping center that met the criteria. While neither Thompson Hills Shopping Center nor State Fair Shopping Center had the square footage of their entire leasable space readily available, ChatGPT concluded that neither shopping center in town fit the above definition and probably didn't have the amount of leasable space to qualify it as a regional mall.

That said, looking at a map of Pittsburg, Kansas, the retail makeup of the area where Five Below is going doesn't seem very different from Sedalia. There's not a big enclosed mall across the street.

The main drag of Pittsburg's Broadway is similar to what we have on our Broadway and South Limit: fast-food joints, restaurants, Walmart, a car wash, Aldi, another grocery store, and Bath and Body Works. So perhaps Sedalia might not be out of the running even though we don't have a traditional regional shopping center.

Interestingly, a company specializing in analytics called Unacast used Five Below as an example of how retailers can use analytics from mobile phones, marry it with population information and other data to help retailers like Five Below figure out what markets to enter, what markets to leave, and get a good educated guess about how their business would do in a specific town or location.

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That data could be game-changing and potentially attract businesses to town that, in pre-internet days, might have thought we were too small. That said, Five Below wasn't a Unacast client when their article was published.

Without delving into the commercial real estate sites, there are a few places along South Limit or Broadway Boulevard where a Five Below could be located.

So, Five Below might find a market like Sedalia a good place to be; whether they come or not remains to be seen.