Drive down Mission Street through Daly City this month and you'll notice something that wasn't true a year ago: the two ugliest gaps in the storefront lineup are gone. For a time, locals had two dark windows to walk past, two parking lots that never quite filled up, two spaces that had been "coming soon" for so long that most people stopped checking. Both are open now. Both sell groceries. And the way they got filled says something about what Mission Street is right now.
The Walgreens Everyone Grew Up With
The building at 6100 Mission Street operated as a Walgreens from the 2000s until 2024, more than two decades as the neighborhood's default pharmacy stop. When it closed, the space sat empty for roughly two years, long enough that the corner started to feel like a gap rather than a business.
On September 10, 2026, Grocery Outlet opened there instead. It's a 13,905-square-foot store, independently owned and operated by David and Carla Gates, and the opening came with the standard Grocery Outlet welcome package: free reusable bags during opening week, a mystery gift card worth between $5 and $500 for the first 100 shoppers, and a sweepstakes running through October 9 for $1,000 in free groceries. The city marked the occasion with a 10 a.m. ribbon cutting at Daly City Hall's calendar of events.
What's worth noticing is what didn't happen. Nobody put a full-line supermarket back into that Walgreens box. Grocery Outlet runs on a different model entirely, closeout and overstock inventory sold at a discount, which is a different kind of grocery trip than the one people used to make there for prescriptions and toothpaste. The site kept its grocery function. It didn't keep its old identity.
The Gap That Took Even Longer
A mile or so away, inside the St. Francis Square Shopping Center at 1420 Southgate Avenue, a second grocery-shaped hole took even longer to close. Pacific Supermarket, the Asian grocer that had anchored that plaza, shut down in 2021. That space stayed empty for four years, well past the point where most retail vacancies get written off as permanent.
Seafood City finally moved in, with a grand opening on July 31, 2025. The wait had its own history: the Filipino supermarket chain first announced plans for a Daly City location back in April 2024, and then the opening slipped for over a year because of construction delays. When it did open, Daly City became the seventh Bay Area city with a Seafood City store, joining Concord, Hayward, Milpitas, Union City, South San Francisco and Vallejo, all cities with sizable Filipino communities. Daly City is home to one of the largest Filipino populations in the country, and Jollibee, the Philippines-based fried chicken chain, opened its first U.S. location here on Mission Street, a detail longtime residents already know and newcomers usually learn within their first month.
Here's the side-by-side, because the timeline is the part that doesn't show up if you only read one story or the other:
| Address | Previous tenant | Vacant since | New tenant | Opened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6100 Mission St | Walgreens (operating since the 2000s) | 2024 | Grocery Outlet | September 10, 2026 |
| 1420 Southgate Ave, St. Francis Square | Pacific Supermarket | 2021 | Seafood City | July 31, 2025 |
What the Order Actually Tells You
Read those two rows together and the pattern is hard to miss. Neither vacancy went to a national full-line grocer. Nobody's opening a Safeway or a Trader Joe's in either building. Instead, one long-vacant space went to a national discount format built around bargain hunting, and the other went to a chain built specifically around Filipino grocery staples, sold at seven Bay Area locations concentrated in the region's Filipino population centers.
That split matches Mission Street more honestly than a single big-box answer would have. This isn't a corridor built around one grocery trip. It's built around two different everyday errands that happen to run down the same half mile: the bargain run and the specific-ingredient run. The corridor didn't get simpler when these spaces filled. It got clearer about what it already was.
It's also worth separating this from the retail story unfolding a couple of miles away at Serramonte Center, where the mall's east side has been going through its own food-focused overhaul with a new Cantonese anchor and a Korean food hall. That's a different kind of retail reset, built around destination dining inside one building. Mission Street's version is smaller scale and spread across storefronts, closer to what people mean when they talk about a neighborhood main drag instead of a mall.
What's Actually Around Both Spaces Right Now
If you're running errands on Mission Street this fall, both new stores sit inside a stretch that already has a working food scene, most of it easy to miss unless you're looking for it. Within a few blocks of the Grocery Outlet and the Jollibee location, current options include:
- Jollibee, 6955 Mission St, the chain's first U.S. location and still a reliable stop for Chickenjoy and Jolly Spaghetti.
- Gateway Kitchen, 6165 Mission St, a Filipino breakfast spot known for tocino, longanisa and Hong Kong-style pork chop.
- Taco Bell, 7255 Mission St, for the fast-food end of the corridor.
- A cluster of smaller restaurants near 6356 Mission St, including Burmese, Filipino and Mexican spots that don't show up on most visitors' radar but keep steady local business.
None of this is new construction. It's the existing texture of the street, and it's part of why the two grocery openings matter more than a single headline would suggest. Mission Street wasn't waiting for an anchor tenant to define it. It already had a working identity built out of small, specific businesses. The two vacancies were just the two pieces that had been missing.
What Changes Now, Practically
For residents who've been driving past the Grocery Outlet construction signs or wondering when St. Francis Square would stop feeling half-empty, the practical answer is simple: both are open, both are running normal hours, and both fill an errand that used to mean a longer drive. Grocery Outlet gives the Mission Street corridor a discount grocery option that didn't exist there before. Seafood City gives St. Francis Square its Filipino grocery anchor back after four years without one, alongside the shopping center's existing mix of Filipino, Burmese and Chinese restaurants and its bakery.
Neither opening rewrites Daly City. Two storefronts filling in is not a transformation story. But it is the kind of change that actually shows up in daily life here, the kind you notice on a Tuesday grocery run rather than in a headline, and the kind that tells you Mission Street's mix of value shopping and cultural specificity is still the thing holding the street together.
If you're curious about how neighborhoods like this one continue to evolve, or you're weighing a move to Daly City and want a read on what daily life actually looks like here beyond the listing photos, our Daly City neighborhood guide is a good next stop. And if you're thinking about what your own Daly City home is worth in today's market, Bryan Cruz and Rey Ancheta are always happy to talk it through. Get Your Instant Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where you stand.
