St. Charles Dominick's closing at the end of April

The shelves at the St. Charles Dominick's on Route 38 at Randall Road grew increasingly bare Wednesday in preparation for the end of a shopping era in just two weeks.

The grocery giant is leaving the St. Charles location to consolidate local operations at its Geneva location at 2000 S. Randall Road. Locals who filled prescriptions at the store were greeted with a caged pharmacy and sign telling them all their drug information had already been transferred to the new location. Inside, sparse goods and rampant open shelving gave the location more of a warehouse feel than a place that fed families for more than two decades. Employees inside confirmed the location will shutter for good on April 30.

That was news to St. Charles Mayor Don DeWitte.

"Officially, we've received no notification from either Dominick's or the landlords," DeWitte said. "It's never a good thing to lose any revenue generator in the community, but Dominick's, for years, has been rumored to be wanting to consolidate that store with their store in Geneva."

Despite the lack of official notification, the writing was on the wall. The Dominick's location did not renew its liquor license with the city for 2010. The landlord for the property is the Shodeen corporation. However, the commercial real estate agent is Jim Young from Geneva-based Summers Commercial Realty. The property was already being advertised as being available in 2010 on the Realtor's Web site.

Young said finding another tenant for the store is high on his priority list. The 55,000 square-foot Dominick's is the anchor tenant of the strip mall known as the Tri-City Shopping Center. Young said he wouldn't rule out splitting up the store into two retail outlets, but the site improvements needed to pull that off don't make it the first option.

"Our first choice would be to have another grocery store in there," Young said. "It's a pretty vibrant area. There's a lot of high traffic, high income levels and a lot of pluses to the site."

Young said other grocers have already been approached about the site, as well as a couple non-grocery uses. There is no current timetable for when a new tenant might move into the location.

St. Charles staff could not immediately provide information about how much of a blow to the city's sales tax revenues the closing will cause.