It’s all about trucking at former mall site
The former Mall of Memphis site was crawling with humanity and trucks Wednesday as TAG Truck Center celebrated conversion of a big vacant tract into a sales, service and training campus.
TAG’s 200-something Memphis employees greeted a crowd of more than 800 -- truck drivers, trucking company owners, customers and suppliers – and showed off the fruits of a two-year, $23 million project on the mall site.
The parking lot was jam-packed with big rigs, buses, wreckers, recreational vehicles, moving vans, Memphis sanitation trucks and FedEx vans, representing Memphis’ status as a distribution giant and home base of FedEx.
Sitting southwest of Interstate 240 and Perkins, TAG is in the heart of the warehouse and distribution center of the Lamar Avenue-southeast Memphis corridor. The project consolidated functions that had been spread across five buildings on Brooks Road, west of Memphis International Airport.
It wasn’t quite like the glory days of the mall, which opened in 1981 and offered nearly 900,000 square feet of retail space. But the opening of TAG Truck Center’s 164,000-square-foot facility represented significant progress for a mall site that sat empty starting in 2003.
“It’s probably bigger than any dream I’ve ever had,” said Gary Dodson, co-founder of TAG with Tommy Earl. “It’s so much more than I would have ever anticipated us being able to do. It’s great for our employees, it’s great for the neighborhood. It’s really a struggling neighborhood, and we hope we’re infusing business back into the neighborhood. It’s a great situation.“
TAG has about 200 employees at the facility at 4450 American Way and about 450 overall. Considering the impact of its January merger with Texas-based Lonestar Truck Group to form TNTX, total employment is about 1,000.
Once integration is complete, TNTX will be one of the nation’s largest Daimler Truck North America dealers. “It’s going to be a big company,” Dodson said.
“We’re doing as much as we can to employ locally, to help the local people and grow as much as we can,” Dodson said.
“In a good year, we’ll be about $1 billion in sales, when we put them both together, we hope,” Dodson said.
TAG completed the move in December. The company built on about 40 acres on the 113-acre site and is offering other parcels for development.
The main building houses new truck sales and leasing, service and parts, with 75 truck bays capable of housing three trucks each. That’s triple the capacity of the previous service department.
Separate buildings include TAG Technical Institute, a training center where TAG trains technicians to work on trucks, both in garage and simulator settings, and a call center that handles FedEx orders for Sprinter van parts.
The Economic Development Growth Engine of Memphis and Shelby County provided a partial property tax freeze as incentive for the redevelopment. Financing was provided under a federal tax credit program designed to give economically distressed communities capital for business growth and job creation.
Greater Memphis Chamber president Phil Trenary said the project was a win for the community and TAG.
“Not only is the site active, but it’s active with something that represents the best in class. They invested in the community, they invested in the people here, on-site training for maintenance technicians, everything from sales and leasing to repairs, you name it, it’s here, so it really is a world-class facility.”
“It’s in a great position from a community standpoint with the jobs; it’s also a perfect position for their clients,” Trenary said. “Obviously it’s easy to get here from the interstate. You go back there, there’s not an empty bay back there, and it goes forever.”
Dave Edwards, a sales representative for Des Moines, Iowa-based Ex-Guard, a maker of truck safety guards, said he’s seen other new facilities, but “This is big. This is very big. From where they came from, this is huge.”
Reach reporter Wayne Risher at (901) 529-2874 or wayne.risher@commercialappeal.com.