Costco is laying the groundwork for its second New Hampshire warehouse, targeting the former Fox Run Mall property in Newington — a high-traffic Seacoast site that has been searching for a major anchor tenant for the better part of a decade. The plan, first reported by New Hampshire Public Radio, would put one of the state’s most-watched retail brands directly off the I-95 corridor and within easy reach of buyers from southern Maine, the Seacoast, and the Greater Portsmouth market.
It would also do something New Hampshire’s commercial real estate community has been waiting for: convert a long-stalled mall redevelopment into a generator of foot traffic, sales-tax-free retail revenue, and shoulder-season tourism dollars all at once.
Why Newington — and Why Now
The Fox Run Mall corridor sits on a stretch of Route 16 / Spaulding Turnpike just minutes from the Maine border, with direct access to I-95. For Costco, that geography is essentially custom-designed: the membership warehouse model thrives in places where a single store can pull from a 30- to 60-mile radius without a competing club nearby. The Seacoast has long been one of the largest underserved Costco markets in northern New England.
Newington also carries practical advantages that mall-redevelopment sites in less commercial towns do not. The infrastructure — utilities, traffic signaling, parking footprint — is already sized for a regional draw. Curb cuts and ingress/egress to the highway network exist. The neighbors are other large-format retailers, not single-family neighborhoods nervous about Saturday morning gridlock.
The site itself has been searching for a defining tenant since the original mall’s anchor stores left and the property’s owners began evaluating reuses. A Costco footprint — typically 150,000 to 165,000 square feet of warehouse with another 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of pad and gas-station space — could re-anchor the parcel and pull other tenants back to the surrounding pads.
What This Means for the Seacoast Economy
A new Costco is not just a store opening; in markets like the Seacoast, it tends to function as a regional retail catalyst. The chain’s traffic numbers are unusually high per location — peer-reviewed retail analyses have repeatedly clocked Costco warehouses in the top tier of national big-box footfall — and that traffic spills over to nearby restaurants, gas stations, and adjacent retailers.
For Newington, the immediate fiscal effect would come through commercial property taxation rather than sales tax (New Hampshire, of course, has no state sales tax — itself a significant draw for cross-border Costco shoppers from Maine and Massachusetts). Property valuation on a redeveloped mall pad with an active Costco anchor would substantially exceed the current valuation of the underused mall footprint, and the town has been waiting for that uplift.
For the broader Seacoast retail economy, the more interesting effect is competitive. Existing membership-club shoppers from southern Maine currently drive to either the West Lebanon Costco in the Upper Valley or south into Massachusetts. A Newington warehouse pulls those trips inside New Hampshire, capturing the gas, prepared-food, and ancillary spending that comes with them.
That cross-border draw matters in a state already studying how to keep retail dollars at home. New Hampshire’s housing market is cooling after years of price acceleration, but the underlying question — how the state holds onto economic activity that could just as easily flow to Maine or Massachusetts — keeps recurring across sectors.
What the Project Still Has to Clear
A Costco announcement is not a Costco opening. The company has a well-documented site-development process that runs in parallel with municipal entitlements: traffic studies, stormwater plans, signage and lighting reviews, utility upgrades, and — at a site this size — a full environmental review of any contamination on the existing mall parcel. Newington’s planning and zoning boards will see those filings before the company breaks ground.
The traffic question is the one that historically draws the most public comment at Costco hearings elsewhere. The Spaulding Turnpike interchange that serves Fox Run is already among the busiest on the Seacoast on weekends, and a Costco’s peak hours typically fall on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons. The company will be expected to fund or contribute to signaling improvements, lane reconfigurations, or ingress redesigns to keep the surrounding road network functional. Those are negotiated outcomes, and the negotiation has not started in public.
There is also the question of the gas station. Costco’s fuel operations are often the most-trafficked element of a new warehouse location, and they require their own permitting path under New Hampshire underground-storage-tank rules and the Department of Environmental Services. Site-design decisions about pump count, queueing space, and tank size are routinely worked out with the town and the state before a final layout is approved.
A Broader Pattern of Big-Box Repositioning
The Fox Run plan also fits a national pattern that has been quietly redrawing the New England commercial real estate map. Enclosed regional malls built in the 1970s and 1980s have steadily lost their anchor tenants, and the parcels they sit on have become candidates for big-box, mixed-use, or multifamily redevelopment. Costco, Target, and Whole Foods have been the most active mall-conversion anchors in the Northeast, with grocery-anchored multifamily as a distant fourth.
Newington’s parcel is unusually well suited for the Costco model in part because the surrounding zoning has not been heavily restricted on commercial use, and because the local economy already supports the warehouse club’s price-sensitive, bulk-purchasing customer base. The state’s broader retail backdrop — strong labor market, persistent in-migration from higher-cost states, and a growing senior population — also favors the format.
Whether the project moves to formal site-plan submission this summer or later in the year, the signal it sends is unambiguous: the Seacoast is being read by national retail capital as a market that can support a much larger big-box anchor than the current Fox Run footprint provides. That re-rating, more than any single store opening, may be the bigger story.
For related coverage, see our reporting on Why Offshore Wind Is Becoming New Hampshire’s Best Hedge Against $39%-Above-A….
