For years, the building at the corner of Marguerite Parkway has been the kind of place you stop noticing because it never changes. The Orchard Supply Hardware sign came down a while back, the parking lot stayed mostly empty except for the handful of cars parked outside Little Caesars, and the building itself just sat there, 37,000 square feet of retail space doing nothing. That's about to change, and the reason it's taking a specialty grocer rather than another hardware chain to fix it says something about how commercial space actually works in this city.
Wholesome Choice, the Orange County grocery chain with locations already running on Culver Drive in Irvine and in Anaheim, is bringing a new store to that exact spot at 24011-24031 Marguerite Parkway. Local outlets reported an opening targeted for this September, so depending on when you're reading this, the doors may already be open or close to it. Either way, the building that's sat dark for the better part of a decade is finally getting a tenant sized to fill it.
The math behind an empty anchor
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you just drive past. The old OSH space alone takes up about 72 percent of the entire shopping center, which totals just over 51,000 square feet. That's not a small storefront sitting vacant next to a thriving strip mall. That's most of the building. When an anchor tenant that size leaves, it doesn't just create one empty unit, it takes the majority of the center's foot traffic and rent roll with it.
The shopping center itself dates back to 1973, with a remodel in 2016, and it sold for $11.63 million to the grocery chain in a deal reported in 2025, with a Denver-based investment company as the seller and Hanley Investment Group representing that sale. A building that old, in a location that's been part of the neighborhood's daily errands for five decades, doesn't sit empty because something is wrong with the corner. It sits empty because replacing 37,000 square feet of hardware store floor space takes the right kind of tenant, not just any tenant.
Who never left
The clearest evidence that the location itself was never the problem is who stayed put the whole time the OSH space sat dark. Little Caesars has operated in that same center for 31 years. Leslie's Pool Supplies has been there for 34. Both businesses remained in the center while most of its leasable space sat vacant.
That's worth sitting with for a second, because it reframes what actually happened here. This wasn't a shopping center in decline waiting for someone to notice. It was a shopping center with one oversized hole in it, waiting for someone to figure out what belongs in a box that big.
What actually fills a box that size
A specialty grocer turns out to be a pretty good answer, and not just because it fills the square footage. Wholesome Choice built its Orange County following on inventory that's genuinely hard to find at a standard supermarket: Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Asian, Latin American, and European groceries, alongside a prepared foods section that regulars at the Irvine location describe as feeling closer to a food court than a typical deli counter. That's a different kind of draw than hardware ever was. A hardware store gets a visit every few months when something breaks. A grocery store with a following gets a visit every week, sometimes twice.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. The old tenant filled square footage. The new one is likely to fill it with people coming back on a schedule, which is a better outcome for every other business sharing that parking lot, from the pizza counter that's been there three decades to the pool supply shop next door.
September is when the calendar turns over too
The Marguerite Parkway building isn't the only thing in Mission Viejo switching from one season to the next this month. If you've spent any part of the summer at Oso Creek Golf Course, the weekly rhythm there has changed too. The course, designed by Ted Robinson back in 1970 and tucked just below Lake Mission Viejo, ran Fiesta Tuesday every week all summer, with $3 Santa Maria barbecue street tacos and a chips and salsa bar that didn't require a reservation. The season was scheduled to end September 22 with a sendoff featuring live music from the Sierra Band.
A few other things worth knowing about if you're still catching the tail end of summer around town:
- The North Paseo farmers market and crafts fair runs its usual Saturday morning slot this month.
- The Mission Viejo library has a Route 66 centennial program on September 26, featuring artist Joan Gladstone's photos and stories from two cross-country road trips.
- The library also has a free SAT practice test for teens on September 27, one more sign that the fall calendar is filling in behind the summer one.
None of these are related to each other in the sense that one caused another. But taken together, they're a pretty accurate snapshot of what September actually looks like here: the things that ran all summer are wrapping up, the things that fill the fall calendar are starting, and one very visible building that's been stuck for years is finally becoming something people will actually walk into.
The building was never the story. The gap was.
It's tempting to read a grocery store opening as just another item on a list of new businesses in town, the same kind of update that shows up in a city newsletter every few months. But this one is different because of what it replaces and how long that replacement took. A shopping center built in 1973, still holding two tenants with decades of tenure, spent years with most of its square footage doing nothing, not because the neighborhood stopped showing up, but because filling a box that size takes the right fit, not just any fit.
That's the more useful way to think about commercial turnover in a place like this. The corner of Marguerite Parkway was never really empty. It just had one enormous, oddly shaped vacancy that took years to solve, surrounded by a shopping center that kept humming along the whole time. Wholesome Choice solved it. The building is becoming something again, and depending on which week you're reading this, it may already have.
If you're the kind of person who notices these things when you drive by, and you find yourself wondering what else has quietly changed in your part of Mission Viejo lately, that curiosity tends to be useful information whether or not you have any plans to move. Raul Vega has spent years watching these corners turn over across Orange County, and if you ever want to talk through what's changing in your neighborhood, Let's Connect.
