photo by: City of Lawrence/MG2

A proposed Costco for northwest Lawrence is shown in this rendering. This is a view from Mercato Drive.

After more than a decade of rumors, they are finally true — Costco has plans to come Lawrence.

The membership-only discount retailer that is famous for everything from mega-sized household goods to low-priced food court lunches has filed plans at City Hall to build a 166,000-square-foot store in the commercial area next to Rock Chalk Park in northwest Lawrence.

In addition to the store itself, the development would include a 24-pump Costco fueling station that would sell discount gasoline.

The new store would be just south of LMH Health’s West Campus facility and would have frontage along Kansas Highway 10. Shoppers, however, would get to the store off Sixth Street, either taking George Williams Way or the smaller Entrada Drive, which is just west of George Williams Way.

A site plan document shows the proposed location of a Costco store in northwest Lawrence.

The store is expected to be a destination-retailer that will draw out-of-town shoppers to Lawrence. Costco has several stores in Kansas, however, this will only be the chain’s second store in the state that is outside the Kansas City metro area. Wichita is the only other Kansas community with a Costco store.

Plans filed with City Hall indicate the store will be a full-service Costco with all the department that shoppers have come to expect. In addition to row after row of general merchandise, the plans show a full deli department complete with a kitchen for the chain’s famous rotisserie chickens, a bakery, a floral department, a produce section, and an automotive shop that will focus on tire sales, among others.

The announcement of a new Lawrence store isn’t entirely unexpected. I reported in September that a source had told me that Costco officials had held a pre-application meeting with city planners.

Beyond that, however, it really is accurate to say that rumors of a Costco coming to Lawrence have been part of the local development scene for more than 10 years. I found this article from November of 2015 where I reported that my “radar was up and my wallet locked up via log chain” after Costco employees in Kansas City were openly talking about how Costco was coming to Lawrence.

If is fair to say that my batteries probably weakened in the 10 years since those rumors, but there have definitely been other times the rumor mill of a Costco started churning again. I guess the decade-long back and forth proves the old saying of “deli cake comes to those who wait.”

Maybe the saying is slightly different in your household but that is because you don’t eat as much Costco deli cake as my family. If you aren’t familiar with Costco, you’ll likely start learning about some of its signature products as the store get closer to an opening.

While there isn’t an official list of iconic Costco products, many users will mention the cakes, the Kirkland brand of generic food and household products, the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo at the food court, discount tires, and more recently, services that allow you to book trips, cruises and other travel.

Of course, a key thing to know about Costco is that none of its goods or services are available to you unless you are member of the the wholesale club. If you are familiar with how Walmart’s Sam’s Club chain functions, then you understand the wholesale membership model.

I’ve said before that if Costco and Sam’s Club got in a food fight to settle who was the best, it would be fought with five-gallon buckets of ketchup and pallets of eggs because both are known for selling items in larger-than-normal quantities but also lower-than-average prices.

Both Costco and Sam’s Club opened in 1983, but Costco has a claim to be the older of the two wholesale club retailers. It opened in 1976 under the brand name Price Club. It’s original location in a converted airplane hangar in San Diego was only open to other businesses. But it soon started to open up its business to members of the general public, and sales took off. The company touts itself as the first U.S. company to go from zero dollars in sales to $3 billion in sales in less than six years.

The company also has gotten quite a bit of positive press over the years as one of the better large corporations to work for, and the new Lawrence store will be a significant source of new jobs. While Costco doesn’t broadly advertise how many employees each store has, numerous retail experts have estimated that a typical Costco store has about 200 to 350 employees.

This CBS article from January reported that many entry level clerks at Costco now make $20 an hour, while upper level clerks make just short of $32 an hour. Many of the Costco locations have a unionized workforce.

The Costco store also is expected to spur a new round of retail and restaurant development in northwest Lawrence. The store will be a major driver of consumer traffic. If you want a sense of how much, look at the parking portion of the plans filed at City Hall. They call for 834 parking space when the store opens, but also set aside another parcel of land that would allow parking to expand to just more than 1,000 total spaces.

Importantly, the store is happening at a location that already is zoned for retail, restaurant and other commercial uses. The overall development is known as Mercato, and has been a partnership between the longtime development families of the Schwadas and Fritzels.

The Mercato development already has drawn a purchase from Braum’s, the Oklahoma-based ice cream and hamburger chain. It owns property along Sixth Street at the intersection of Entrada Drive. That means it will be right along one of the two major entrances to Costco. Braum’s has owned the site for a few years, but has not announced a timeline for when it would build a store there. It is a safe bet this Costco announcement will spur that project along.

In total, the plans filed with City Hall, show 14 other undeveloped lots in the Mercato development. It stands to reason that all of those will get more serious inquires from interested businesses that want to capitalize off of being next to a major traffic generator like Costco.

The addition of Costco will also bring the original idea of the Rock Chalk Park sports development closer to reality. Rock Chalk Park and Mercato — they are next door to each other — were developed at the same time. The idea was that having a host of KU sports facilities and a city of Lawrence recreation center that can host multi-team youth tournaments from across the region would lead to development of a major retail center next door. In turn, once that retail center developed, it would help the sports complex attract more tournaments and dollar-spending tourists. It was more than 10 years ago that those plans were formed, and for the most part, the retail and commercial development hasn’t come.

But this Costco filing is the clearest sign yet that the original vision may be back on track.

No word yet on when Costco could open at the location, but the company is known for being very efficient in store construction. The fact the project doesn’t need any city zoning approvals should speed up the City Hall zoning process. Costco’s building contractor touts it takes 110 days on average for a store to open after construction begins.