O’Reilly buys Checker chain, closes Hutchinson store

That's too bad. I really liked Checker. They were much cheaper than O'Reillys, much friendlier and had a better selection. Too bad we have ANOTHER empty building in this soon to be Ghost Town.

That's capitalism — competition has winners and losers. On the bright side, the last space in the County Fair Marketplace building anchored by Papa Murphy's Pizza on the west and Subway on the east is apparently being filled by a soon to open GameStop store.

I don't see how this is a Ghost Town, BigBoy. In recent years we've had a major two-story building put up downtown (Cornerstone Commons with American Pastime, Quinoz, etc.). That hasn't happened in decades. It was followed by another new downtown building for the video store.

Several new restaurants have opened — American Pastime, Quizno's, Dunn Bros Coffee, Squeaky's, El Loro, Madcakes and last week Zella's.

A new bank, Home State, opened on Highway 7 West in the past year. There must be some money here to support five banks (with a total of eight locations) and a credit union. A ghost town would not have that.

The mall has local ownership that is aggressively marketing the spaces in the mall and has lined up at least four new tenants already. One has open and the others should soon.

Plus, Runnings will relocate to the Hennen space at the south end of the mall, about doubling its space over what it had behind Plaza 15. Runnings will likely generate much more foot traffic through the mall than Hennen did. This is not a knock against Hennen, but a city of 14,000 with three furniture stores as Hutchinson had until now is pretty rare. When housing is not being built, furniture sales hurt.

We also are getting a Best Buy.

Hutchinson is somewhat unusual for a town of 14,000 to have three major discount stores — Target, Wal-Mart and ShopKo. We actually had four with Kmart until that company's bankruptcy issues. We also have three grocery stores, four if you count Target's food area.

Just because a corporate merger results in a store closing as in Checker's case, or as a result of unusual issues, as in Cub Foods' case, or because of corporate reorganization in the face of bad results, as in Office Max's case, I don't think you can label Hutchinson a Ghost Town. There are plenty of other cities of 10,000 to 15,000 in rural Minnesota that would love to have our problems. Open store fronts can be seen as opportunities for entrepreneurs with a different concept or vision.

(Terry Davis is a Hutchinson Leader staff writer. E-mail him at davis@hutchinsonleader.com.)

Speaking of Capitalism... isn't it strange that Coleman is using Stella's as hub for his visit? Wouldn't other places of business or for-that-matter other food sellers who have be open for longer than a few weeks be more deserving? Perhaps a business who has paid some real-life dues so-to-speak. Is the Haag name pushing this through? I guess it can be disguised as "Capitalism".