Hobby Lobby opens in Chubbuck

Chipotle, Popeyes and Red Robin are just a few of the recent businesses that have opened in Chubbuck.

On Monday, the city welcomed another new businesss – Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby is part of the Pine Ridge Mall.

At its grand opening Monday morning, tons of people were lined up down the sidewalk waiting for the doors to open.

Roger Bowden, the manager, said he was happy at how many showed up, especially for a holiday.

“I’m real excited at the turnout this morning,” Bowden said. “We had a huge line out there and it was good to see the support from the community. It’s just great to see how many people were out there lined up ready to come in and shop.”

The Chubbuck location of Hobby Lobby is the 735th store for the company. It is the fourth location in Idaho.

The store will have about 50 employees. Bowden said the staff worked non-stop for about three weeks to have the entire store ready for opening day.

Chubbuck Mayor Kevin England said this is beneficial because of the jobs it brings, but also because it helps Pine Ridge Mall.

England said there has been a lot of buzz and anticipation for a Hobby Lobby to come to the area. At the opening, he talked about a letter he received a couple years ago from a grade school student, asking that he do all he could to get a Hobby Lobby to town. He said after it was announced it would be coming to Chubbuck, he got another letter from the same girl and she told him how excited she was to have it.

So he said the community has been exciting and very supportive of Hobby Lobby coming in and he expects the store to do very well.

“This is going to be a great thing for the mall,” England said. “It’s pretty obvious to me that this is going to increase the foot traffic in the mall and we’ve looked for that kind of thing for some time. These new mall owners are exciting people and they’ve told us from the day that they bought this mall that they were going to make it back up and running and become a viable part of our community again and that’s happening.”

Hobby Lobby is located next to Cal-Ranch at the Pine Ridge Mall. The store’s hours will be Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. It will be closed Sundays.