Princeton Town Center Broke Ground In July. Here's When You'll Actually Shop There.
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
For two years, "Princeton Town Center" has been a phrase that showed up in city council agendas and zoning filings more often than it showed up as an actual building. Residents who drive US-380 past the empty acreage at Beauchamp Boulevard, across from the Walmart Supercenter, have watched that corner sit flat while apartment complexes and single-family subdivisions filled in around it. On July 15, that changed. A crew broke ground on a Kroger Marketplace, and for the first time since the project first surfaced in city documents, there is dirt actually moving on the site.
What residents need now isn't another announcement. It's a straight answer to the question that actually matters: when do the doors open, and what's really going in there.
The July 15 ceremony marked the start of construction on a nearly 100,000-square-foot Kroger Marketplace, the anchor for a 66-acre retail development called Princeton Town Center. Mayor Eugene Escobar Jr. and Kroger Texas Division president Rudy DiPietro spoke at the event, along with representatives from The Seitz Group, the Dallas-based developer behind the project. Kroger's investment in the store totals close to $40 million and is expected to create around 200 jobs. The store will include a pharmacy, a Murray's Cheese counter, and a fuel center with 14 fueling positions.
Princeton's store is the third Kroger Marketplace to break ground in North Texas this year. A location at North Custer Road and Frontier Parkway in McKinney broke ground February 27 and is targeting an early 2027 opening. A store in Fate broke ground March 27 with a 2027 opening planned as well. Princeton, despite being the fastest-growing of the three cities, is running behind both on the calendar. That's worth sitting with for a second: the town with the most explosive population growth in the trio is also the one whose residents will wait longest for a full-service grocery anchor to actually open.
Here's the detail that got buried under the ceremony photos. At a Planning & Zoning Commission meeting on July 6, just over a week before the shovels went in the ground, the city's director of development services, Shai Roos, gave residents a blunt reality check.
"Once the ground breaks, it still takes two years before you can shop in a store," Roos said. "It will be December 2027 by the time the stores will be open."
A week and a half later, following the July 15 groundbreaking, developer Eric Seitz told the Princeton Herald that anchor buildings are scheduled for completion in July 2027, with a grand opening planned for late fall 2027.
Those two estimates, coming from the city's own staff and the project's own developer barely more than a week apart, both land in the same general window, fall to winter 2027, but they don't match exactly. Neither is wrong. One is describing when construction on the buildings themselves wraps. The other is describing when a shopper can actually push a cart through the door. For a town that has spent years being told retail was coming soon, the honest takeaway is that groundbreaking day and opening day are two different milestones, and the gap between them for a project this size runs close to a year and a half. Plan your errands around late 2027, not around this year or next.
The uncertainty around this project hasn't just been about timing. It's been about who is actually signing leases. In October 2025, reports named Kroger and Home Depot as prospective anchors, with Hobby Lobby, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, PetSmart, and Aldi mentioned as additional retailers. Jim Wehmeier, CEO of the Princeton Community Development and Economic Development Corporations, publicly denied any knowledge of those names at the time and said no deals were imminent.
It took five more months for that to become official. Development agreements for Kroger and Home Depot weren't signed until March 2026, with the Kroger agreement executed March 3 and the Home Depot agreement March 19, the same two names the city had waved off the previous fall. By the time the full site plan reached the Princeton Herald on July 22, 2026, the confirmed roster had grown, and Aldi was no longer on it:
If you've been following this project on Facebook or Nextdoor and heard a different set of names at some point, that's not your memory playing tricks. The city itself denied a list of names in October that turned out to be substantially the ones now under construction.
The site sits on the northwest corner of Beauchamp Boulevard and US-380, directly across from the existing Walmart Supercenter. That placement matters more than it might seem. Rather than opening a new retail node somewhere untested, Princeton Town Center is consolidating around traffic and shopping patterns that already exist at that intersection. It's a bet on proven ground, not a bet on where growth might eventually show up.
And growth has already shown up. Princeton's population grew 30% between July 2023 and July 2024, the fastest rate in the country among cities of at least 20,000 people. Housing has kept pace with that growth in a way retail hasn't. The Whitley, a 330-unit apartment community south of J.M. Caldwell Sr. Community Park, opened on Beauchamp Boulevard and was welcomed by the Princeton-Lowry Crossing Chamber of Commerce well before this retail groundbreaking. Rooftops arrived first. The stores to serve them are arriving on a lag measured in years, not months.
Princeton residents already have real weekend options for the outdoor half of a Saturday. Sister Grove Park Trail, on the edge of town, is the most substantial hike and bike trail in the area, with 370 feet of elevation gain and a 4.6-star average across nearly a thousand community reviews. J.M. Caldwell Sr. Community Park offers a shorter creekside loop and a playground closer to the newer housing stock going in along Beauchamp. Lake Lavon sits just outside city limits for fishing and boating.
What's been missing is the other half of the weekend, the errand half. Right now, a grocery run, a Home Depot trip, and a sit-down dinner mean three separate drives, likely toward McKinney or Fate. Once Princeton Town Center's anchors open, that list starts to collapse into one stop on one corner. That's the actual change worth waiting for, not a ribbon-cutting photo, but three or four fewer trips a week onto US-380.
If you take one thing from this update, let it be this: don't expect to be pushing a cart through the new Kroger this year, or even next year. Between the developer's own fall 2027 target and the city staff's December 2027 estimate, the honest range to plan around is late 2027. Given how many names have surfaced, gotten denied, and then quietly confirmed over this project's several-year run through city filings, the safest habit going forward is to check the source directly, whether that's the city's own newsflash page or the Princeton Herald's coverage, rather than repeating whatever showed up on a neighborhood app last week.
Princeton has waited a long time for its rooftops to be matched by its storefronts. The wait isn't over, but for the first time, it has an end date attached to it, even if two credible people gave you two different versions of that date in the same month.
If you're watching how growth like this reshapes daily life on your own street, or thinking about what a corner like Beauchamp and 380 does to home values nearby, Tiffany West tracks these Collin County shifts closely and is always happy to talk through what it means for your specific address.
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