For years, if you lived in Murrells Inlet and needed hardware, home goods, or a normal grocery run, you got in the car and drove. North toward Surfside Beach. South toward Pawleys Island. The town spent its retail energy on the waterfront, where restaurant after restaurant opened along US-17 Business to catch the tourist traffic rolling past the MarshWalk. Meanwhile, the building that should have handled the rest of daily life sat there, mostly empty, for the better part of a decade.
That building is Inlet Square Mall, and this year it stopped sitting empty. What's opened there, plus a grocery chain finally landing in town for the first time, plus a drive-thru coffee stand a few miles down the highway, adds up to something residents haven't had in a long time: a reason to run errands without leaving Murrells Inlet at all.
The Mall That Took a Decade to Die
Inlet Square Mall opened in 1990 as the area's largest shopping center, and its decline was slow enough that most longtime residents watched it happen in stages. Kmart closed in 2014 after a Walmart Supercenter opened in Garden City. JCPenney announced its closure the following year. Stein Mart left over a lease dispute and relocated to South Strand Commons near Surfside Beach. The Frank Theaters movie complex shut down overnight in 2016 with no warning to the public. Books-A-Million closed in 2020. By the time the mall officially closed for redevelopment on January 15, 2024, only Belk and Planet Fitness were still holding the place together.
Becca Dunn, general manager of CHD Interiors, has operated across the street from the mall for more than 40 years. Describing the property before the current work began, she put it simply: "This whole area had just really been rundown."
What's Actually Open Right Now
The turnaround started in September 2025, when Floor & Decor opened at 545 Mall Drive as the first new tenant on the redeveloped site. That was the proof of concept. The bigger signal came seven months later, on April 17, 2026, when Hobby Lobby opened its doors at 231 Mall Drive. The store runs 53,000 square feet, making it Hobby Lobby's 27th location in South Carolina, and Todd Carroll runs it as store manager.
Between a flooring and home improvement retailer and a full craft store, Murrells Inlet residents now have two categories of errand they used to have to leave town for. Neither one is a restaurant, which matters if you've been reading about how much of the Inlet's recent retail turnover has been dining concepts trading places along the waterfront strip. This is a different kind of business landing in a different part of town.
What's Still Coming, and What "Later This Year" Actually Means
Not everything at Inlet Square is finished. Neal Bowers, the real estate manager for Paramount Development Corporation, confirmed in February 2026 that Chipotle is planned for one of the outparcel lots near the Bypass, with an unnamed coffee company slated to build next door. He wouldn't say who that coffee company is. Paramount also isn't handling the Home2Suites by Hilton hotel going up near Belk. The company sold that parcel off separately, and construction there is being managed by someone else entirely.
Bowers was careful not to promise a finish line. He described the redevelopment as "an ongoing thing" and said only that he expected a lot of it to be open by summer. Summer's already come and gone as of this writing, which means the honest read is that Chipotle, the coffee shop, and the hotel are all somewhere in the pipeline without confirmed opening dates. If you've been checking the outparcels expecting a grand opening sign, that's why you haven't seen one yet.
The Bypass Gets Its Own Grocery Store
A few minutes from the mall, at Woodside Village, 4430 Highway 17 Bypass, Aldi is building out its first-ever Murrells Inlet location. The store will take over the old Badcock Home Furniture space, in the same plaza as Chick-fil-A and Luna Mexican Bar & Grill. Aldi's regional vice president, Krysta Cearley, confirmed construction had already started as of March 2026, with an opening expected later this year.
This one matters more than a single store opening usually would. The Grand Strand already has four Aldi locations, in Conway, North Myrtle Beach, Pawleys Island, and Surfside Beach. Murrells Inlet has never had one. If Aldi has been part of your grocery rotation, this is the first time you won't have to leave town to use it.
The Coffee Run Gets Shorter Too
Not every piece of this is happening at the mall. On US-17 Business near Van Buren Drive, Salty Bottoms Espresso opened as a drive-thru coffee stand next to Gator Zone Sports Bar and Grille. Owners Todd and Lea Hoiland moved to the Myrtle Beach area a few years ago and spent close to ten months working through permits before opening. The shop pours coffee sourced from Pisgah Coffee Roasters, a Brazilian coffee roaster based near Asheville, which the Hoilands say makes it one of the only spots in the area serving Brazilian beans. For now the menu is drinks only, with pastries planned down the line, and the shop runs Monday through Saturday from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
It's a smaller addition than a Hobby Lobby or an Aldi, but it fits the same pattern. Someone looked at a gap in what residents could get without driving and built something to fill it.
The Actual Shift
Put these pieces together and the pattern is clearer than any single opening suggests. Murrells Inlet has spent the last several years adding restaurants at a fast clip along its waterfront corridor, which is a story about tourism. What's happening now, at the old mall and at Woodside Village, is a different story about residents. Home improvement, craft supplies, a discount grocer, a coffee stand that isn't trying to be a destination. None of it is aimed at someone visiting for a week. All of it is aimed at someone who lives here and got tired of driving to Surfside or Pawleys for basic errands.
If your regular loop through town is the MarshWalk and the restaurants along US-17 Business, you may not have noticed how much changed on the Bypass side. The mall that sat empty for a decade is filling back in, and for the first time in a while, Murrells Inlet is building for the people who already live there.
If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this looks like for the long haul, whether you already call it home or you're weighing a move to the Grand Strand, Jack Poznanski tracks this kind of local change as part of the job. Let's Connect if you want to talk through what it means for your own plans.
