Wilco will open its doors Tuesday in the Sonora Plaza
Wilco, a farm-supply-department store, will open its doors to the public Tuesday morning in the Sonora Plaza Shopping Center on Mono Way.
On Monday, the store was bustling in preparation for a ribboncutting ceremony scheduled for Tuesday evening. The shelves were stocked to the brim, and not a single item was purchased yet, whether it was Carhartt workwear, blueberry plants, bags of pet food, nuts and bolts, or Pendelton towels.
“It’s a perfect community for what we do,” said Jake Wilson, director of marketing and e-commerce for Wilco. “We’re pretty excited. Just all the things we tend to do well in the community with, it’s all here.”
The building is divided into a labyrinth of merchandise with five distinct sections: pet and pet grooming; work and western wear; tools and hardware; garden and plants; and livestock and feed.
Wilson described the layout and formatting of Wilco as sort of a cross-competitive hybrid, overlapping with home improvement stores like Lowe’s in some ways, but also filling the same market as a Petsmart or Boot Barn.
There are some modern and distinct attributes which make the Sonora location unique too: special animal cleaning and grooming stations, a spacious garden center replete with vegetables, and tall livestock gates that hang like scaffolding in the rear. There is a drive-through warehouse entrance where local shoppers can pick up feed or large items by driving through the front of the building to the back.
A digital kiosk is out front, allowing customers to print receipt lists of searchable items such as large bags of feed or cattle gates.
There are some local people interested in maintaining accounts with Wilco, Wilson said.
On Thursday, Wilco will also get its first shipment of chicks, which will be featured in a central aisle.
The business employs about 33 people, though the number will fluctuate up to 40 depending on the season.
Wilco took over the vacant
space left by Orchard Supply Hardware, which closed over two years ago.
Wilson said Wilco was looking into spaces vacated by Orchard Supply as commercial hubs with a proven track record of success.
“They closed it for a lot of reasons, not being a successful store wasn’t one of them,” Wilson said.
Wilco’s first California store in Petaluma was also a vacated Orchard Supply store.
The entire space was described previously as a 58,000-square-foot space. Wilson said the store was about 25,000 square-feet, while the warehouse was about 12,000 square feet. The store also includes the yards and garden center.
Wilco is short for Willamette Valley Consolidated and was established in 1967 by the merger of five cooperatives located in Oregon’s Willamette Valley south of Portland.
Wilco is a farmer-owned cooperative, a business model that involves memberowners to apply for an ownership stake in the company. The company is owned and run jointly by the members, who share in the profits and benefits. The company is not publicly traded and is based in the small Oregon town of Mount Angel.
Wilson said the profits of the business went back into the stores or back to the farmer-owners as “patronage.”
He said Wilco is hoping to have several local applicants for the farmer-owner positions, a process that takes about a month and approval by a board.
“If the store makes any money, it would be great if it went back to farmers in the area,” he said.
The Sonora Wilco location is its second location in California and the 23rd overall. The other locations are in Oregon and Washington.