AUGUSTA — Over the past week or so, blue signs have cropped up along Civic Center Drive proclaiming that Five Below is opening soon at the Marketplace at Augusta. The Philadelphia-based retail chain, which opened 31 stores nationwide from February to April, is bringing its second store in the state to central Maine a little later this year. It’s moving into space formerly occupied by Circuit City.

Retail chains such as Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar are growing at a time when long-established retailers are shrinking their footprints.

A former Circuit City, next to Dick's Sporting Goods in the Marketplace at Augusta, will make way for a Five Below discount store. Staff photo by Joe Phelan

These shifts are the result of changing consumer behavior, influenced by the internet and the convenience of e-commerce, economists say, but other factors are shaping how people in central Maine are shopping now.

Fifty years ago, department stores were the anchors of downtowns of even small cities.

“In Portland, Porteous and Benoit’s, these were important stores in southern Maine,” said David Findlay, the Pugh Family Professor of Economics at Colby College in Waterville. “They drew in significant business.”

But when the Maine Mall opened in South Portland, it drew business from the city to the suburbs.

“Where the dollars were spent physically changed,” Findlay said. “Now it’s (also) a physical change, but it’s electronic.”

People are using the internet to buy goods and bypassing what for decades were iconic shopping establishments such as Sears, which closed its Augusta store earlier this year, and Macy’s, he said.

Bon-Ton, which opened at the Maine Mall four years ago, is closing this month. And JC Penney announced plans earlier this year to close its Rockland store.

While retailers such as Amazon claim a large share of online business, customers in rural areas are looking at different options, and it’s the growing sector of what are sometimes called “small box” stores.

These are small-format stores offering an inexpensive range of products, often but not always located away from retail centers. “These stores are filling what they perceive to be a niche, or a market not being met by others,” Findlay said.

For Dollar General, which has 32 locations across Maine including stores in Augusta, Manchester, Litchfield and Oakland, the goal is to choose locations where it can serve customers within about a 5-mile radius or a 10-minute drive.

Company spokeswoman Laura Somerville said the company looks for places it can offer customers an easy and convenient shopping choice.

The market, Sheena Bunnell says, is made up of people, particularly in rural areas, who are choosing to shop at stores in their own towns rather than traveling to retail centers.

“They want a shopping experience,” said Bunnell, who is professor of business economics at the University of Maine at Farmington. “They want to meet their budgets and get a decent price for a decent product.”

Everything at Five Below is priced between $1 and $5, from its fidget spinners and backpacks to fitness balls to its smartphone accessories and clothing. But in its case, Dana Zuppo, marketing manager at Five Below, said after the company opened its South Portland store in 2014, it looked north to the Augusta-area retail market.

While central Maine is more rural than southern Maine, the draw of Augusta was its status as a retail center.

“We like the strong collection of national retail that this market has, which gives it its large regional drawing power,” Zuppo said.

Jessica Lowell can be contacted at 621-5632 or at:

jlowell@centralmaine.com

Twitter: JLowellKJ

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