By David Nordby, The Brillion News, April 9, 2020
The building that used to house Shopko Hometown in Brillion has a new owner with plans for the facility. Country Visions Cooperative, the Reedsville farm supply cooperative, has purchased the building on West Ryan Street. “I think this is a big deal for us. It’s a great location, excellent visibility with the neighbors we have around there. I just think Brillion’s a great community to be in,” Steve Zutz, President and CEO of the company, told The Brillion News.
The building has been vacant since spring 2019 when Shopko closed operations. The site includes 5.7 acres of property and a 36,000-square foot steel building. The building will serve multiple purposes for Country Visions Cooperative, including retail. The company hopes to open this fall, but with the unknowns of the world, that is a fluctuating timeline.
We were looking at this last fall, looking at the potential things we could do with it. We kind of backed off a little bit as we got into the early winter months and then brought it back to discussion again and came up with a reasonable price on the building and pulled the trigger on it,” Zutz said.
The terms of the sale will not be disclosed. “Obviously, there will be a lot of work to do to get our retail presence started in there. We won’t utilize the whole building for the retail presence. We’ll have warehousing in the building and potentially some new things that we move into the future that haven’t been determined yet,” Zutz said.
Country Visions’ locations include Reedsville, Mishicot, Sheboygan Falls, and De Pere. In addition to retail, they offer agronomy, propane, refined fuels, and grain divisions, with convenience stores and quick food restaurants.