Like Walmart, QT etc. they often close a saturated location but let it sit to thwart a competitor from moving in and taking business away from one of their more successful locations.
No argument there. I'm sure there are also tax reasons they hold on to properties as well. The old Osco is just kind of an odd outlier in that area since they bought it four years after they built two locations in 2002 that are roughly two miles northeast and southwest from that location. There are two Walgreens one a mile north built in 1994, and another a mile south built in 1999, which is now across the street from a Target store with a CVS inside.
A couple of years ago I ran into a guy that works for The Town Of Gilbert Development Services and asked him about that building, and he told me that CVS has not put in on the market since they bought it. CVS still regularly maintains the building and the grounds around it and the Fire Dept. does annual inspections and the building could be reopened quite easily since it has been taken care of. He said there have been a number of inquiries but CVS has no plans to sell. He then told me that the only real drawback is that you cannot extend the footprint of the site because along with the city's ROW, SRP, the Salt River Project, the Roosevelt Water Conservation District, RWCD, owns the majority of the ROW for water distribution.
On the corner of the property is an SRP pumping station that delivers water throughout the area through pipelines and open canals that date back to when the area was all agriculture, and RWCD owns the rights going back 100 years.
Most vacant businesses, Walmart/Walgreens/grocery stores don't normally sit too long here. Usually, within at most five years, most places change hands. Even when we went through the grocery market shake up from 2000 to about 2008, vacant stores were quickly converted to other businesses with Goodwill buying or leasing quite a number of them, followed buy Sprout's and other niche' grocers buying or leasing smaller stores.
Where I lived in the north PHX area there was a Walmart that closed when they built a new location along with a Sam's Club a mile west, and within five years WinCo bought it and opened a location. They have done a mix of using closed locations or building new depending on the area. I know of at least one QT location that was one of the Gen 2 stores that close when they built a Gen 3 about a mile away that has now been bulldozed and two seperate places built on the site. Interestingly, there is a Gen 2 QT near me, one mile away built in 2001, and another about three miles away in 2007, and then they built a Gen 3 a half mile from the 2001 location. I felt that when I moved here just before the Gen 3 store opened, that the other two would go away. Five years later they're all still profitable.
On a side not of convenience stores, I have been to one of the oldest 7-11 stores that I know of in Tempe. It has been a 7-11 since it was built in 1963.
The Google street view is from last year before they upgraded the sign.
https://goo.gl/maps/vWbbDM6oX1oAgR8H6
