Sam's gone

Just north of Office Depot is another site with a long, convoluted history. This is the old Aurora Sam's Club, which closed in early 2018 along with the only other two of their stores in the Pacific Northwest. This store was also, bizarrely, Walmart's only presence within Seattle city limits, with the nearest Walmart to Seattle being all the way on the other side of Lake Washington in Bellevue (Factoria). (I know Walmart is typically a suburban store, but still, most cities have at least some sort of Walmart in them... but, as with pretty much any retail chain, Walmart has grown very slowly in the northwest compared to most of the country.) It was certainly not surprising, though, to see the trio of local Sam's Clubs close, as Costco has an extremely loyal following here (it's a local business, after all, with its headquarters in Issaquah, an eastside suburb), plus it has to be hard to sustain a membership-based business with so few stores for customers to visit (and a poor geographic distribution, too, with this one in north Seattle and the other two in south King County). (And yes, that is a lot of parentheticals for one blog post!)