The long-awaited new Mills Fleet Farm store in Hermantown is slated to open on Wednesday.
Mailers sent to homes in the Twin Ports area in recent days have announced an Aug. 17 opening date for the $18 million, 183,000-square-foot store along Loberg Drive.
That's on target with what Fleet Farm officials told the News Tribune in late April, as work continued on the 35-acre site just south of Hom Furniture and west of Sam's Club, and highly visible from Miller Trunk Highway. Fleet Farm officials did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
The company's plans to build a new store in Hermantown were first reported in the News Tribune in October 2014, and construction started last summer.
It's the chain's 36th store and marks Fleet Farm's expansion into Northeastern Minnesota; the store is expected to draw customers not just from the Twin Ports, but also from the Iron Range and beyond.
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"We are so excited to be here," Fleet Farm's senior vice president of store operations, Nickolas Widi, told the News Tribune earlier this year. "This is a market we've wanted to be in for some time."
For those in Duluth, the closest Fleet Farm stores have been in Baxter, Minn., more than 100 miles to the west, and Cambridge, about 100 miles to the south. Besides stores in central and southern Minnesota, Fleet Farm has stores in Wisconsin, North Dakota and Iowa.
Fleet Farm's offerings include sporting goods, hunting and farm supplies, tools and hardware, clothing, home improvement, automotive supplies, equipment rental and a seasonal garden center.
The Hermantown store also will have an auto service department, a lumber yard with a 17,000-square-foot accessory building, a gas station with 16 pumps, a three-bay car wash and a kerosene dispenser. It will provide jobs for 150 to 200 full-time and part-time employees.
