By Dan Eaton, Columbus Business First
October 02, 2013

The area’s second Costco store will open at Easton Friday.

The popular warehouse store will be the first tenant to open its doors in the new Easton Gateway development that encompasses 54 acres between Easton Town Center and Interstate 270.

Easton Gateway will add another 500,000 square feet of restaurant, retail and service space and 3,000 more parking spaces to the already well-populated Easton area. Other tenants committed to the project are Whole Foods Market Inc. (NASDAQ:WFM), which will build its third grocery store in the market, outdoor retailer REI and discount department store chain Saks Off 5th. The REI and Saks Off 5th stores will be the first in Central Ohio.

REI arrives a few months after fellow outdoor retailer Cabela’s Inc. opened its first area shop at Polaris. The addition of Saks Off 5th comes just after Easton added Nordstrom Rack, the discount division of the Nordstrom Inc. department store chain, which just opened at the other end of the 1,300-acre Easton complex in the Easton Market center.

Issaquah, Wash.-based Costco Wholesale Corp. (NASDAQ:COST) has 634 warehouses, 451 in the U.S., and first arrived in Central Ohio with a Polaris store in 2006. The Easton store is one of 13 openings Costco has in the final three months of the year.