Letters to the Editor
Letter to the Editor | Every real estate agent told me the same three things about Gig Harbor. Let’s fix the third one
I shopped for a house here in 2024, and again in 2025 when I finally bought. Different agents, different neighborhoods, different price points. Almost without fail, I heard the same three things.
First came the superlatives: Wonderful community. Beautiful water. Great schools. Real neighbors. All true, which is why I bought.
Second came the pitch that sealed it for a lot of us: everything you need is fifteen minutes or less from everything else.
And third, usually near the end and in a slightly lower register, came the caveat. You do have to cross the toll bridge to get to a Trader Joe’s.
Sit with how odd that is. These are professionals whose entire job is to sell you on a place, and they volunteered a shortcoming. Not as a dealbreaker. More like a disclosure, the way you would mention that the crawl space is a little tight. It came up so reliably that it might as well have been printed on the listing sheet.
It is also the only one of the three claims that is measurably false in a specific way. The Tacoma Narrows toll runs $4.50 eastbound with a Good To Go pass, $5.50 if you stop at the booth, and $6.50 if you let them mail you a bill. Tolls are collected only in the Tacoma-bound direction, so the trip out costs and the trip home is free. Call it one run a week and you are at roughly $234 a year in tolls alone, before gas, before the twenty minutes each way to University Place or the forty to Silverdale. That is not fifteen minutes from everything you need. That is a standing tax on a grocery preference.
So here is my modest proposal. Let’s stop repeating the caveat and start doing something about it.
Trader Joe’s has a form for exactly this. It lives under Contact Us on their website and it is called “Request a Trader Joe’s in My City.” Here is the direct link: https://www.traderjoes.com/home/contact-us/request-a-store
The company says plainly that there are no guarantees, but that being wanted matters to them. They say just as plainly that requests alone do not open stores. The site has to fit, the timing has to work, and they have to be able to staff it.
Which means a thousand identical “please come to Gig Harbor” notes probably go nowhere. A few hundred that hand their real estate team actual addresses, square footage, traffic counts and demographics might get read twice.
Here is what they have said they look for. Population density. Easy access, meaning the mechanics of getting in and out and the flow of traffic patterns. Enough parking, which they have gone out of their way to insist they do care about. They do not grow by acquisition, because rebranding somebody else’s building would not feel like a neighborhood store. And analysts believe the demographic screen leans on median income, age and education.
Now look at us. The Gig Harbor Peninsula census area holds about 56,000 people in roughly 22,000 households, with a median household income near $130,000 and about half of adults holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Widen that to the trade area a store here would really serve, including Key Peninsula, Fox Island, Purdy and the southern edge of Kitsap, and it gets better. A leasing package for one Gig Harbor center puts the primary trade area above 81,000 people with an average household income over $170,000, and counts roughly 91,000 vehicles crossing the Narrows daily. Those are the landlord’s numbers rather than the state’s, but they are the numbers Trader Joe’s real estate team would see anyway.
And here is a point worth making directly to them: that toll works in their favor. It is a wall around this market. Once a store is on this side of the water, the households out here have very little reason to shop anywhere else.
Now the addresses.
Olympic Village, 5500 Olympic Drive NW. Kidder Mathews has been marketing Suite C101 at 14,962 square feet, at $25 per square foot triple net, on a flyer dated last October. Most Trader Joe’s stores run between 10,000 and 15,000 square feet, so this is not a stretch, it is a fit. The leasing materials describe the center as sitting just off Highway 16 at south Gig Harbor’s highest volume interchange, with more than 63,000 vehicles a day nearby. Fred Meyer and Harbor Greens are both within about a third of a mile, and the parking lot already exists. The former Bartell Drugs space in the same center has had no permanent tenant since 2025.
Point Fosdick Square and Uptown, 4831 and 4701 Point Fosdick Drive NW. The busiest retail node on the peninsula. Point Fosdick Square runs nearly 184,000 square feet anchored by Safeway, Kohl’s and Michael’s, and its owners report 2.1 million visits over a twelve month period. Uptown adds Marshalls, HomeGoods and the theater. Highway 16 carries 70,000 vehicles a day past it, Point Fosdick Drive another 20,000. The catch is that the vacancies listed on the center’s early 2025 brochure are small, in the 3,500 to 4,200 square foot range, so a store would require a landlord willing to combine or backfill. Landlords have done stranger things for a tenant that pulls traffic like this one.
Gig Harbor North, Borgen Boulevard at Harbor Hill Drive. This is where the rooftops are going. Costco, Target and Home Depot are already there, along with Walgreens, the YMCA, St. Anthony Hospital and Heron’s Key. The Harbor Hill master plan has long included junior anchor and pad space. If Trader Joe’s would rather build than backfill, and they often would, this is the corner.
All three would work. Naming all three is better than naming one, because it tells their team we understand they have to choose.
One last bit of honesty. Trader Joe’s reached 656 stores in 43 states this summer, and it grows slowly, one store at a time. Analysts also note that heavily touristed towns can count against a site, because visitors bulk shop at Costco instead of buying single serve groceries. We may not clear their bar. But we will certainly never clear it by continuing to say the line at parties and leaving it there.
The form takes two minutes. It is at https://www.traderjoes.com/home/contact-us/request-a-store. If enough of us send something specific instead of something wistful, we will at least have made a real case.
And maybe the next round of agents will only have two things to say.
Fletcher Bonds
Gig Harbor