The ‘secret’ is out, Advance Auto moving to Seivers Blvd.

September 11, 2019 by G. CHAMBERS WILLIAMS III

The not-so-well-kept secret is finally out: The Advance Auto Parts store on Clinch Avenue in Clinton will be moving to its new location on South Charles G. Seivers Boulevard in early December.

Store Manager Ben Brown confirmed the plans this week, saying the new Advance Auto building will be between the nearly constructed Fast Pace Urgent Care clinic just to the west and a new Dollar General store still to be built just to the east, on the south side of the road.

Then, over the weekend a sign was erected in front of the building announcing that the new store was “Coming Soon.”

“We’re planning to open in the first week of December, and our new store will carry about half again as many parts as we have in the current location,” said Brown, who has worked at the store for the past eight years.

The store will add five employees to its current staff of 15 when the new location opens, and the behind-the-counter parts storage area will be larger, Brown said. While floor space will be about the same as before, the open shopping area for customers will be smaller than it is now to accommodate the additional parts inventory, he added.

Since grading began on the site of the three new buildings several weeks ago, speculation has been running high in Clinton about what businesses would be occupying the property. Social media posts have mostly focused on the urgent-care center, Advance Auto Parts and a “dollar store,” although some had suggested that it would be a Family Dollar.

But Advance Auto’s Brown and contractors working at the site confirmed Thursday that the third building would be a Dollar General.

Most of the shell building for the urgent-care clinic is finished, with primarily just the interior left to be done, while exterior walls were nearly completed this past week on the Advance Auto building. Site preparation was still underway for the Dollar General, though, and preliminary foundation work had begun.

The general contractor for the Advance Auto and Dollar General buildings is Raven Construction of Knoxville. Charles Blalock & Sons of Knoxville, which also is working on the new bridge project nearby, was in charge of excavation work on the site, according to contractors’ employees working on the projects.

On Thursday, employees of ECB Masonry of Knoxville were working to finish the exterior concrete block walls of the Advance Auto store.

Brown said Advance Auto Parts has been in the 180 Clinch Ave. building “since the early ‘90s,” but decided to move to a new location mostly because of the state of the present building.

“The building is in bad condition,” he said. It’s on the west outside corner of the parking lot of the partially empty shopping center that includes the Ingles supermarket.

“We believe the new location will have a lot more traffic going by the door, too,” Brown said.

The parking area for the new store will be about the same size as that of the current location, he said.

Advance Auto Parts, Inc., based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has 4,912 stores in the United States and Canada.

Dollar General has not yet announced its plans for the new store next door, including when it might open or whether it might be larger or have a wider variety of merchandise than other nearby locations. Dollar General Corp. is based in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.

The Fast Pace Urgent Care center has set an Oct. 11 opening date. It will operate seven days a week, with extended weekday hours. This will be Fast Pace’s 100th location. Based in Waynesboro, Tennessee, Fast Pace has clinics in Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.