Shopping in Queen Creek, Arizona: Where the Stores Are and What Is Still Being Built

1.Where Queen Creek’s Major Stores Actually Are

Queen Creek’s retail is not spread evenly. It runs along five corridors, and knowing which one a store sits on saves more time than any map app will. Ellsworth Road and Ellsworth Loop Road carry the warehouse-club and general-merchandise cluster. Rittenhouse Road carries the Walmart Supercenter and the cinema. Queen Creek Road carries the Fry’s Marketplace and Riggs Road the Safeway. Power Road, west of everything else on this list, carries the Home Depot.

The practical rule that falls out of that table: if the list is warehouse club plus general merchandise plus a health-food grocer, one trip up the Ellsworth corridor covers all three — though not one parking lot, because Costco sits about three-quarters of a mile from the Target on a separately named road (our own straight-line calculation from the mapped coordinates for each store). If the list includes lumber, paint or appliances, that is a separate trip to Power Road on the far side of town. And if it includes a movie, the cinema is its own stop on Rittenhouse Road: it is not inside Queen Creek Marketplace, and by the same calculation it sits about a mile west of the Walmart on that road, not beside it.

Two Queen Creek destinations that are not shopping centers but sell direct have their own pages here: the Queen Creek Olive Mill, which publishes its own store hours, and Schnepf Farms.

2.Costco, Target, Walmart and Home Depot, Store by Store

Costco: warehouse #1620, on Ellsworth Road

Queen Creek’s Costco is warehouse #1620 at 20260 S Ellsworth Rd, Queen Creek, AZ 85142, phone (480) 847-1000, per Costco’s own warehouse-locator page as published on September 20, 2026. Note the road name carefully: Costco’s address is on Ellsworth Road, while Target and Sprouts are on Ellsworth Loop Road. They are two named roads in the same corridor, and typing the wrong one into a navigation app is the single most common way people end up in the wrong parking lot.

Target: inside Queen Creek Marketplace

The Target is at 21398 S Ellsworth Loop Rd, phone (480) 214-4810 — the same street address Queen Creek Marketplace publishes for itself, because the store sits inside the center. This is the store Target’s own locator returns for Queen Creek as of September 20, 2026. Worth knowing before you trust a map app: when our researchers searched “Target, Queen Creek, AZ” without a ZIP code, the mapping tool returned a Target in Manhattan; adding “Queen Creek Marketplace, AZ 85142” returned the right one. Search the ZIP or the center name, not the town name alone.

Walmart: Supercenter #4451, and it is not at the Marketplace

The Walmart Supercenter is store #4451 at 21055 E Rittenhouse Rd, phone (480) 457-1158. It is a separate destination from Queen Creek Marketplace: per WDP Partners, which owns and operates the property in a joint venture with the original owner, the Walmart Supercenter is the anchor tenant of Cornerstone at Queen Creek, a power center at the northwest corner of Rittenhouse and Ocotillo roads. WDP’s own page describes Cornerstone as a 340,000-square-foot power center, but that page is dated September 19, 2018, so treat the square footage as an older published figure rather than a current one. A secondary aggregator gives a larger number; the developer’s own figure is the one we publish.

Home Depot: the Power Road outlier

The Home Depot at 7401 S Power Rd, phone (480) 988-6810, carries a Queen Creek 85142 address on the retailer’s own store page, but it sits well west of the Ellsworth cluster. If you are weighing where in town to buy, our best neighborhoods in Queen Creek comparison is the place to work out which master plans put you nearest which corridor.

3.Queen Creek Marketplace: What Is In It, and What Nobody Publishes

Queen Creek Marketplace is at 21398 S Ellsworth Loop Rd, Queen Creek, AZ 85142, phone (602) 866-0900 — one of the two addresses on this page that come from a mapped business listing tied to the property’s own site rather than from a retailer’s store locator, the other being SanTan Village further down. Its official site organizes tenants into four categories — Shop, Dine, Play and Services — and that directory is the only authoritative tenant list for the property.

Here is the honest limit of what we can publish. Our capture of the center’s own Shop directory ran alphabetically only as far as the letter D before it cut off, so the list below is a representative sample, not the tenant roster — for anything past the letter D, the center’s own directory is the only complete list.

• Captured from the center’s own directory on September 20, 2026, A through D: 360 Physical Therapy, Ahipoki Bowl, Alliance Urgent Care, Amazing Lash Studio, America’s Best Contacts & Eyeglasses, Barrio Queen, Barro’s Pizza, Bath & Body Works, Boot Barn, Buffalo Wild Wings, Burlington, Carter’s, Chase Bank, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Crumbl Cookies, Dave & Buster’s, Del Taco.
• What that sample tells you: the mix runs from national apparel and off-price through fast-casual dining to entertainment, banking and medical services. The alphabet stops at D because the capture stopped there, not because the center does.

Three things about this property are genuinely unpublished, and any page that states them is guessing. There is no property-wide set of opening hours — this is an open-air center, so each tenant sets its own hours and the center publishes none. There is no official tenant count and no gross leasable area figure on the operator’s own site. If a hours-or-size number matters to your trip, the tenant’s own page is the source, not the center’s. For the sit-down side of that tenant mix, our Queen Creek restaurant guide goes deeper than a directory listing can.

4.Groceries: Fry’s Marketplace, Safeway and Sprouts

Three full grocers carry Queen Creek addresses on their own store locators as of September 20, 2026, and each one sits on a different arterial, which is why residents tend to pick by geography rather than by banner.

The line item that surprises people relocating from other Arizona cities is the grocery tax. Queen Creek taxes food for home consumption at its full 2.25% town rate, the same rate it charges on general retail, where a number of Arizona municipalities exempt grocery food entirely. On a $250 weekly grocery bill, the town’s 2.25% share alone works out to about $292 a year, and that belongs in the Queen Creek cost of living math rather than being discovered at the register.

5.What You Actually Pay at the Register

Queen Creek straddles the Maricopa–Pinal county line, and the combined sales tax on a retail purchase depends on which county the store sits in, not on where you live. That is the one tax fact a shopping page owes you.

Two corrections to things that are widely repeated. First, the Queen Creek Special District — the district the Town names as covering Queen Creek Marketplace, Cornerstone and QC District — used to carry an extra 0.25% surcharge on top of the town rate. That surcharge was repealed effective October 1, 2024, so the Marketplace no longer carries a town-rate layer that the rest of Queen Creek does not. What still varies from store to store is the county half of the rate, which is the 8.55%-versus-8.95% split above. Second, the rate on an untaxed online or out-of-state purchase is not the retail rate: Arizona use tax has no county component, so a Queen Creek buyer owes 5.6% state plus 2.25% town, or 7.85%.

That raises the obvious question — which county is each store on this page in? We are not answering it store by store, because nothing in our sources establishes the county for an individual parcel, and a mailing city of “Queen Creek” settles neither the county nor the town boundary. Because the rate follows the store’s parcel, the only reliable way to know which figure applies to a given address is to look that parcel up. Our guide to what county Queen Creek is in explains how to verify a parcel, and the full rate card for every category, including restaurants, hotels and construction, is in our Queen Creek sales tax breakdown.

6.Does Queen Creek, AZ Have a Downtown?

Yes — but it is a planning district rather than a single property, and it is younger than the strip centers. The Town of Queen Creek’s Economic Development department describes the Town Center as encompassing nearly 900 acres of commercial, entertainment and housing uses. Downtown Queen Creek, as the Town draws it, spans from the Communiversity along Ellsworth Road to the Queen Creek Wash — the wash our Queen Creek Wash Trail guide covers — bordered on the west by Ellsworth Loop Road.

The timeline is the part that explains the current construction. The Town Center was originally envisioned in 1994 and has been developed and refined over the decades since. The Queen Creek Town Council approved a Town Center / Downtown Core Plan Update on February 21, 2024, refining the goals, objectives and policies of the adopted General Plan and reaffirming many of the 2017 policies. Alongside that update, the Town created a Priority Action Plan for 2024 through 2029, sorting the plan’s recommendations into lower, moderate and higher priority for the next five years.

The scale figure is worth quoting exactly, because the Town has published it two ways. The Town’s downtown investment page, as published on September 20, 2026, states “more than $200 million in private investment and 230,000 square feet of commercial development currently underway including restaurants, retail, and mixed-use projects.” The Town’s own January 2026 news release worded the same milestone as nearly $200 million. Both are the Town’s numbers; we are not picking one silently. That release also launched a public-awareness campaign the Town calls Downtown Vibes, built specifically to reframe the construction disruption as visible growth rather than an inconvenience.

7.What Is Under Construction Downtown Right Now

The Town maintains its own downtown project tracker with a live status label on each project. The table below records those labels as the page read on September 20, 2026, alongside the size figures reported for each project and where those figures came from. The Town’s page tells readers to check it for future updates, so treat every status here as a dated snapshot, not a permanent state.

The Switchyard: the one that changes the shopping map

The Switchyard is a $120 million mixed-use development on 10 acres at the northeast corner of Ellsworth and Ocotillo roads, developed by Creation in partnership with Horizon Real Estate Ltd., with GFF Design as architect and LGE Design Build as contractor. It broke ground on May 7, 2025. Its commercial square footage is reported three ways and we are not reconciling them for you: the Town’s own “Downtown Vibes” slide deck, posted to its economic development site in August 2026, gives 47,950 square feet of restaurant, retail and office; the Queen Creek Tribune specified 48,000 square feet for Phase 1 in November 2025; and AZ Big Media put it at 54,000 square feet in its June 2025 groundbreaking coverage. The Town’s figure is the newest and the only one from the Town itself.

The tenant list comes from the developer and from trade press, not from the Town. The developer’s own project site and the June 2025 groundbreaking coverage name Postino, Shake Shack, Snooze A.M. Eatery and The Porch. A second wave reported on March 10, 2026 adds Bamboo Sushi — described as an Arizona market debut — plus ROOM and PORCH, Zara Nail Bar and Edward Jones. A residential phase of 215 luxury apartments was in design as of mid-2025; the developer’s own site is internally inconsistent, referencing both 206 and 215 units, so 215 is the more consistently corroborated figure rather than a settled one.

The same caution applies to the rest of the list: in November 2025 the Tribune reported an end-of-2026 opening expectation for The Perch and a mid-2026 target for the Rusty Buckle Saloon, and on September 20, 2026 the Town’s tracker still carried both as Under Construction with no date attached. For everything being built in Queen Creek beyond the retail core — the roads, the battery plant, the hospital expansion — our guide to what is being built in Queen Creek carries the full construction picture.

8.Harkins Theatres Queen Creek, and the Screen Count Nobody Publishes

The cinema is Harkins Theatres Queen Creek, 20481 East Rittenhouse Rd, Queen Creek, AZ 85142, phone (480) 344-4111. Harkins’ own theatre page lists an in-lobby Child PlayCenter, expanded concessions, Ultimate Rocker seating, reserved seating, mobile ordering, all-digital projection and 3D projection, along with assistive listening devices, audio description and closed captioning. The same page carries an in-theatre food menu — items such as a “Big Screen Burger” and a “Crispy Chicken” — on top of the standard concession stand.

9.What Residents Still Drive Out of Town For — and How to Check Before You Go

Two gaps close out the picture. The first is home-improvement brand choice: Home Depot is in town on Power Road, and Lowe’s own Arizona directory lists no Queen Creek store, so a Lowe’s trip means Gilbert, Chandler or Mesa. The second is a regional enclosed mall: Queen Creek Marketplace is open-air, and no enclosed mall with a Queen Creek address turned up in the sources behind this page. Note that no operator publishes a leasable-area figure for any center in town, so we do not rank them by size.

The comparison people actually make is with SanTan Village in Gilbert, at 2218 E Williams Field Rd, Suite 235, per the mapped business listing tied to the center’s own site. Measured straight-line from the coordinates published for each location, it is approximately 7.0 miles from Queen Creek Marketplace. That is a calculated great-circle figure from mapped coordinates on September 20, 2026 — it is not a driving distance, and the actual road route is longer. We are not publishing a drive time, because no routed source in our files supports one.

A five-minute check before any Queen Creek shopping trip

1. Confirm the store’s address on the retailer’s own locator, not a directory. Ellsworth Road and Ellsworth Loop Road are different roads in the same corridor.
2. Check the individual tenant’s hours. Queen Creek Marketplace publishes no property-wide hours, so there is nothing central to check.
3. For anything downtown, re-read the Town’s downtown investment and construction tracker the morning you go. Its “Now Open” and “Under Construction” labels are live and the Town says so.
4. If the purchase is large enough for the tax to matter, establish which county the store sits in before you assume 8.55% or 8.95%. Queen Creek has not adopted any reduced rate on the portion of a single item above a dollar threshold, so the full combined rate applies to the entire price no matter how expensive the item.
5. For a movie, confirm the auditorium and format on the Harkins Queen Creek showtimes page rather than trusting a screen count you read somewhere.