Opening of stores delayed

It looks like Odessans may have to travel to Midland to shop at Best Buy and PetSmart a bit longer than expected.
   In November 2008, a new Best Buy store was announced for developer Larry Lee’s new Chimney Rock Center near the northeast corner of Northeast Loop 338 and Highway 191. At the time, Lee said the company hoped to open by the 2009 Christmas shopping season.
   But a little more than two months before “Black Friday” starts the shopping season, land at the site doesn’t appear to have been cleared.
   The opening of a new location for the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailer has been pushed back into next year, Best Buy spokeswoman Erin Gunderson wrote in an e-mail.
   “We do have plans in place to open a new store location in the Odessa area next summer. At this time I do not have any additional details as to the specifics of the plan, but we are expecting to enter that market in the mid/late summer 2010 time frame,” Gunderson wrote.
   Pets retailer PetSmart, meanwhile, announced in April it was building a location in the former Goodwill store at the southwest corner of Grandview Avenue and 42nd Street.
   While PetSmart initially said it planned to open during the first quarter of 2010, spokeswoman Jennifer Simmons is now being less specific.
   “All I can really say is it’s scheduled to open in 2010,” she said last week.
   Simmons said she didn’t know why the company had backed off the first-quarter opening, but that such adjustments were not unusual. Potential issues could be variations in construction schedules.
   “We just plan out usually months and sometimes years in advance for stores,” she said.
   Lee, the Odessa developer, wasn’t available by phone last week, but he said in an e-mail that construction on PetSmart will be complete by Feb. 1.
   Lee didn’t address the schedule for the Best Buy store.