Trader Joe’s to open new store in former Big Lots site in Anaheim Hills

Trader Joe’s website lists its Anaheim Hills store as location 295 and marks it coming soon at 6336 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road in Anaheim Hills Village. The building sits at East Santa Ana Canyon Road and South Fairmont Boulevard, where the old Big Lots space is being filled by a different retailer rather than revived for the same workforce.

For displaced Big Lots workers, that is the usual retail arithmetic of a closure and replacement: the storefront stays in play, but the payroll changes. A new tenant can bring fresh hiring, yet it does not restore the old jobs that vanished when Big Lots was pushed into bankruptcy and later began shutting down the remainder of its stores.

The Anaheim Hills project had been on local watchlists after permits surfaced about a year earlier. Trader Joe’s has tied the location to its 2026 growth plan, which calls for 18 new stores in 12 states, including two in California. The company’s openings are often treated as a real-estate draw, a pattern commonly described as the Trader Joe’s Effect, because the grocer tends to pull foot traffic and attention to the surrounding shopping center.

Big Lots entered Chapter 11 in September 2024 after carrying about $3.1 billion in debt owed to 5,001 to 10,000 creditors, according to court records. Its annual report said the chain operated 1,392 stores as of Feb. 3, 2024, before it closed hundreds of locations and announced in December 2024 that all remaining stores would begin going-out-of-business sales.

That sequence left Big Lots employees facing a fast-moving shutdown while another retailer prepared to move into one of the chain’s former sites. In Anaheim Hills, the store box is not sitting empty for long, but the reopening belongs to Trader Joe’s, not to the workers who used to clock in under the Big Lots sign.