It’s never been smooth at The Shops at Biddeford Crossing, a huge “lifestyle” outdoor mall that attracted big-box retailers when it opened eight years ago near the intersection of the Maine Turnpike and Route 111.

First, the economy started to tank the next year and suggestions that perhaps 500,000 square feet of retail space added to the southern Maine market was too much seemed to be borne out. Some anchor stores, including Lowe’s and Best Buy, disappeared as retailers shed under-performing locations. And any suggestion that 2014 would be a breakout year seemed unlikely when officials announced in January that the nearby Kohl’s department store was sinking, literally, because of improper fill used on its construction site.

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The Kohl’s department store on Route 111 in Biddeford will have a grand reopening Friday. The store had closed for much of 2014 to address the problem of a sinking foundation caused by improper fill on the construction site. Photos by Whitney Hayward/Staff Photographer

Helen Truman leaves Kohl’s in Biddeford on Wednesday.

All that was followed this summer by employees at the Market Basket supermarket, which had replaced Lowe’s, telling customers to stay away.

But now, “we feel really good about the health of that center,” said Daniel Stevenson, Biddeford’s economic development director, who think the wrinkles have finally been ironed out.

Stevenson points to Kohl’s: The rebuilt store’s doors opened Sunday and a grand reopening is planned Friday. The Market Basket employees’ dispute with the company board is finally resolved and store manager Micum McIntire said sales are up 25 percent over September 2013, when the store was still offering opening specials.

“People were pretty down in the dumps with things,” said Craig Pendleton, the executive director at the Biddeford & Saco Chamber of Commerce. “There was a long period of time when things seemed very bad.”

But now, Pendleton said, business seems to be picking up both at the shopping center and downtown. Many had feared the final death knell would sound for the downtown, filled with vacant mills, when the huge, modern shopping center opened just a few miles away.

Instead, the mills are being redeveloped and filling with restaurants, locally owned shops and artists’ lofts. The city changed its tax-increment financing deal a few years ago, after road improvements around Biddeford Crossing were paid off. The TIF allows the city to steer a portion of its new property taxes generated by the shopping center toward downtown programs, from a contest offering financial help to entrepreneurs to sidewalk improvements and grants to property owners for sprucing up facades.

“People are pretty enthusiastic about it all,” Pendleton said.

Stevenson said the timing couldn’t be better. The rebuilding at Kohl’s brings back jobs that were lost for much of the year, he said, and part-timers whose hours were cut as the Market Basket impasse deepened are back on the job.

Both factors should give a boost to local spending in the final three months of the year, the key period for retailers, Stevenson said.

Stevenson noted that Market Basket’s recovery is crucial because grocery shoppers often think of other things they need when they head out for food and then they patronize other stores.

“I’m glad they finally were able to work out all those things on the corporate level,” he said.

McIntire said part of the increase in sales at Market Basket seems to be new shoppers, attracted to the store by the coverage of the employees’ effort to have the chain’s president, Arthur T. Demoulas, put back in charge after he was fired in early summer.

“It’s rebounded quite well and a lot of customers tell me that they didn’t shop here before,” he said.

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