Well looks like someone is finally moving in. It's being converted to a massive climate controlled storage facility. They've cut out and installed several outward facing units, constructed a builiding for the office (although why would you with 70k square feet of space in the building), erecteed a fence to secure the facility, and apparently are planning on opening in mid-July. From the looks of things from the outside, they should be able to make it.

While it's not my first choice for a re-development (because who gets excited about storage units), at least it's something. It did take quite a long time for another climate controlled facility to come in though after the old Sutherland's was converted.

The problem with the old Walmart stores is that Walmart owned the stores and leased the land they were built on. They bailed out of these stores to build the Supercenters and neighborhood markets they owned outright land and all.

These old stores took forever to sell because Walmart wants premium prices for the stores. When you add that on top of whatever the land owner wants for the land lease/buy price it pretty much makes it cost prohibitive to buy the store. These old stores rarely get reused as another retailer because Walmart won't sell to them or its cheaper to buy else where or build from the ground up on vacant land.

Most of these stores end up getting demolished or remodeled into churches, schools, city halls, offices, car dealerships, storage facilities or strip shopping centers.

In nutshell, Midwest City was lucky the storage place snagged it because it's odd location and cost made it a hard sell. Personally I was hoping the school district would buy it, tear down the store and relocate Monroney Jr High on the site with bigger and better facilities.