AVON — Lorain County’s newest major department store — a 104,000-square-foot JCPenney — is slated to open this fall in the Avon Crossings retail development.

But that doesn’t mean the 42-year-old Penney store at Midway Mall is a goner.

“There is no change in direction at this time for that store,” said Tim Lyons, a JCPenney spokesman and public relations manager at the corporation’s headquarters in Dallas. “We are still there and plan to be there.”

Rumors have swirled for months that the planned October opening of the new Penney’s in the development at state Route 83 and Chester Road in Avon would put the nails in the coffin of the 157,000-square-foot, two-story store that has been a retail anchor at Midway Mall since 1966.

“We have many cases where we have multiple stores in the same market, where stores are not too far apart,” Lyons said. “We try to position them so they work together and enable us to reach more customers” rather than compete with one another for the same pool of customers.

The Avon store is among 36 the company plans to open in 2008, Lyons said. The company opened 50 new stores in 2007 and 28 in 2006.

Nearly all of the new stores, known in department store parlance as “off-mall” locations, are freestanding operations. “You’re not seeing them in malls much these days because they’re just not building malls,” Lyons said.

JCPenney holds its own with other department store giants despite the fact the company has lower sales, Lyons said.

The company owns and operates 1,073 stores, with sales totaling $19.9 billion in 2007.

Contact Steve Fogarty at 329-7146 or sfogarty@chroniclet.com.

 

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