Foley's New Retail Anchor Is Just Off McKenzie Street
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Where do you buy a rotisserie chicken in Foley these days?
For years the answer was easy: the Winn-Dixie at 1235 South McKenzie Street, a few doors down from the strip that's carried most of Foley's grocery and retail traffic since long before Tanger Outlets or OWA existed. That store closed by the end of 2025, part of a wider retreat by its parent company, which announced in October 2025 that it would rebrand as The Winn-Dixie Company and pull back to a Florida-and-south-Georgia footprint, closing or selling more than thirty stores across Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Fairhope's Winn-Dixie on Baldwin Square went dark in the same wave. Several of the shuttered Alabama locations found new operators within weeks, reopening as Food City or Piggly Wiggly. As of the most recent public accounting of those transitions, Foley's McKenzie Street store hadn't been named among them.
That's the quiet half of the story. The louder half is happening a block away, on a street most Foley residents have never had a reason to drive down.
McKenzie Street has been Foley's commercial spine for decades. It's where the Winn-Dixie sat, where Krystal relocated a couple of blocks down the street, where Tanger Outlets draws steady traffic off Highway 59. It's a corridor built around a specific kind of retail geography, small to mid-size storefronts, a grocery anchor, outlet stores pulling in traffic headed toward the beach.
Losing a full-size grocery anchor on that strip, even temporarily, changes the errand math for whoever lived close enough to walk or make it a two-minute stop. Foley still has grocery options along Highway 59 and the Beach Express, so nobody's stranded. But the store that anchored the McKenzie corridor specifically is gone, and nothing has moved into that exact building to replace it.
Meanwhile, the city has been investing in infrastructure that points away from that old core entirely, including a new Public Works Campus on North Poplar Street and a planned fire station in Foley's northeast quadrant. The pattern isn't retail alone. Foley's built footprint is stretching outward, and McKenzie Street is no longer the only place that growth is landing.
The retail equivalent of that shift has a name and an address: BJ's Wholesale Club, going up on a 14-acre site along the South Juniper Street Extension, one block east of South McKenzie. It broke ground on December 17, 2025, and construction has been underway since, with the company and the city targeting a fall 2026 opening. At 106,370 square feet, it will be the first wholesale club South Baldwin County has ever had.
That word "first" matters more than it might sound. Foley isn't getting a second grocery store to replace what it lost. It's getting a category of retail it never had at all. The nearest existing BJ's to Foley is in Pensacola, which is where South Baldwin members have had to drive until now. This new club becomes only the second Alabama location for the chain, following a Huntsville-area club that opened in late 2023, which tells you how rare this format still is in the state.
In Foley News, Mayor Ralph Hellmich described the city's view this way:
"This will be the first wholesale club in South Baldwin, and it means our citizens won't have to leave Foley for this type of shopping."
Given that the project broke ground in mid-December and was expected to take roughly a year to complete, a fall 2026 opening lines up almost exactly with where construction should be right now. If you've driven past South Juniper lately, you're likely watching the last stretch of that timeline play out in real time.
BJ's is the headline, but it isn't opening into a vacuum. The last year has brought a handful of other changes worth knowing if you're mapping out where to eat and shop locally:
None of these individually rewrites the map. Together, they show a town where the churn is real but uneven. The McKenzie corridor is still picking up some new tenants, OWA is absorbing others, and the biggest single addition in years is landing somewhere new altogether.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only look at the finished picture. Winn-Dixie's McKenzie Street store closed by December 31, 2025. BJ's broke ground two weeks earlier and wasn't expected to open until roughly a year later. By the time the city's next major retail investment opens its doors a block over, Foley's South McKenzie corridor will have gone close to twelve months without the kind of full-size grocery anchor it had relied on.
That gap is the part a market roundup usually skips past: once both events have happened, the transition can look instant. It won't have been. Anyone doing regular grocery runs on that side of town has already spent months adjusting to a stretch of McKenzie Street without its anchor tenant and is still waiting on a replacement that was never going to occupy the same building anyway.
The practical takeaway isn't which specific brand opened or closed. It's that Foley's commercial center of gravity is genuinely moving, not just refreshing. A wholesale club is a different kind of trip than a weekly grocery run, built around bulk buying, fuel, and less frequent visits. With BJ's on the South Juniper Street Extension rather than in the old Winn-Dixie building, Foley's next major retail addition is landing a block over.
If you've been driving past South Juniper without much reason to, that's likely to change by the time BJ's opens this fall. And if you've been wondering why the McKenzie Street storefront has sat empty longer than expected, now you know it's not a delay so much as two separate projects on two different timelines that happened to overlap.
If you're thinking about what this kind of shift means for property values or demand along either corridor, or you're simply trying to figure out where Foley's growth is actually headed next, Will Henriksen knows this part of Baldwin County well enough to talk it through in plain terms. Let's Connect.
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