Mooreville, NC, Mar. 23--Lowe's Companies Inc. is expanding its Mooresville base to add 600 more workers, the home improvement retailer announced, according to the Charlotte Observer.
The company plans to add 136,000 square feet to its 400,000-square-foot corporate facility, with construction beginning in May and finishing in September 2005.
Since September, 1,350 Lowe's employees have moved to Mooresville from the company's original Wilkesboro base or have been added to staff the rapidly growing retailer, which moved up 10 spaces to No. 50 on the Fortune 500 list announced Monday.
The existing building will continue adding workers until it fills to its capacity of 1,500; the expansion of the building's east wing will bring the total employment to 2,100 by the end of 2005.
Since the company first announced its plans to build a base in southern Iredell County, officials said long-term plans call for the property to hold as many as 8,000 workers in 2 million square feet. But the company had not publicly set a timetable for those plans.
Plans for the second phase were under way before the first set of workers moved in last fall, said John Vining, the Lowe's vice president of administration. "It might not be too much longer before we do some conceptual planning for phase three," he added.
The company is retaining its Wilkesboro base, with about 1,700 workers, but plans for all growth to occur in Mooresville. The company does not call either facility its headquarters. Its top executives operate from Mooresville.
The company also recently opened a 94,000-square-foot facility called a "Planogram" on its Mooresville campus that serves as a mock store to test new goods and displays.
Lowe's, the No. 2 home improvement retailer behind Home Depot, had $30.8 billion in sales last year and has about 950 stores in 45 states. Company president Robert Niblock has said Lowe's intends to open between 130 and 150 new stores a year for the next several years.
That growth means more distribution centers and more centralized workers to support the retailer's nationwide network, Vining said.
"We're in a very aggressive expansion posture," he said. "We need to stay ahead of the curve."
