Costco is so desperate for more parking at its Eugene warehouse store that it is proposing a radical step: tearing down the 32-year-old vacant former Office Depot building across Chad Drive and turning it into a parking lot.

Costco bought the Office Depot site last August for $6 million, the deed shows. In the Eugene-Springfield market, it’s unheard of for a buyer to spend so much on a relatively new building and then tear it down just to make parking.

But the parking crunch at the Chad Drive Costco, plus the proximity of the former Office Depot site, and Costco’s deep pockets, apparently made a magic formula. Costco in its most recent fiscal year reported an $8 billion profit on revenues of $275 billion.

The new lot on the former Office Depot site would have 202 spaces and would be designated — at least partly — for employees, according to plans Costco submitted to the city earlier this month. A typical Costco warehouse store has about 250 employees. At the Eugene store, they use existing spaces near the store, in effect competing with shoppers.

Costco earlier this year didn’t respond to Eugene Weekly’s questions about its intentions for the former Office Depot property, which includes the 25,000-square-foot empty retail space and about 1.5 acres of associated parking.

But elements of Costco’s plan remain unresolved. Costco is asking city planners whether the traffic lights and pedestrian crosswalk in front of the main Costco entrance on Chad Drive need to be altered as part of creating the new parking lot. The pedestrian crosswalk isn’t used much now. With the new parking lot, that would change. Costco is also asking the city whether the company needs to conduct a traffic analysis to determine impacts of the proposed new parking.

As part of its tentative plan, Costco said it also wants to add four gas pump islands to the filling station on the west side of its Chad store. Each island would have two nozzles. The station now has 12 gas pump islands, totalling 24 nozzles. 

Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.

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