Burlington was getting ready to pull out of Manteca.

It’s current location in the former Mervyn’s department store space in the Mission Ridge Shopping Center on South Main Street was more than twice the footprint it needed for “right-sized” stores as part of a chainwide strategy shift for the discount retailer.

As such, the overhead of the space lease was excessive and the store configuration reflected an aging approach to retailing from Burlington’s perspective.

The city’s economic development team — put in place by the current City Council to aggressively go after retail, job centers, and restaurants not just on municipal property but in private developments as well — got wind of the pending loss of a retailer.

They have been keeping tabs on other potential spaces for other retailers and knew JoAnn’s Fabrics was planning to close its Stadium Retail location.

Within days of JoAnn’s Fabric’s announcement that they were closing all of its stores due to declining sales chainwide, Manteca’s economic team had help arranged a “new marriage.”

They connected Burlington with Stadium Retail Center owners.

The location was the right size and actually a better fit being next door to Ross given discounters create a synergy when they are located close to each other such as Marshalls and Ross in Tracy.

The current Burlington location already has a national retailer interested in leasing the space. The city is also playing a role in making that happen.

Mayor Gary Singh confirmed the city is continuing working with other retailers such as Hobby Lobby, Trader Joe’s, and WinCo. All three national retailers have been working with city officials as well as center developers.

Hobby Lobby and Trader Joe’s are looking to lease and not own

WinCo is more of a challenge since they want to own the land and build their store. Typically, newer WinCo stores are 80,000 to 100,000 square feet.

Manteca has lost several national retailers through chainwide bankruptcies, such as Big Lots, that closed all of their stores.

Rite Aid in the Manteca Marketplace anchored by Save Mart on West Yosemite Avenue also closed stores through bankruptcy with some locations sold to competition such as CVS and Walgreens.

Neither of the two drug store chains opted to take over the Manteca Rite Aid location given CVS has three Manteca locations including inside Target and Walgreens has one store.

Since 2000, the non-franchise national retailers that Manteca has lost has been through the respective firm’s ability to make a profit nationally and not on local store performance per se.

Burlington is moving into space at the Stadium Retail Center originally opened in 2007 with a Circuit City that went bankrupt in 2009.

It became a JoAnn Fabrics that year until the chain filed for bankruptcy this year.

Bankruptcy was the same fate that led to Manteca store closures such as Kmart and Best Buy.

Best Buy, which opened in 2008 in Orchard Valley and now houses a fitness club, reorganized national during the Great Recession and increased Internet competition.

The firm, which successfully bounced back despite dire predictions made at the time by retail experts, indicated it was closing the Manteca store even though it wasn’t among those underperforming.

What doomed the Manteca location was its close proximity to established stores in Modesto, Stockton, and Tracy. All three were bigger retail shopping draws based on nearby population at the time — Manteca has basically pulled even since with Tracy.

And all three offered a Best Buy store within 15 miles of Manteca.

Kmart tried to stave off bankruptcy.

The Manteca store was among the first round of store closures.

Not that anything could have saved Kmart ultimately, but the Manteca store had the disadvantage of being off to the side in terms of Manteca grow patterns and not near other established shopping.

The 110,000 square-foot former Kmart store on Northgate Drive has since been converted to a   U-Haul storage facility.

Manteca officials have been marketing the city’s sustained population growth and median household income that has now topped $120,000 to catch the attention of national retailers and restaurants.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com