What's New in Cerritos? Retail Changes Happening Now

Drive along South Street past Los Cerritos Center and you'll pass a graded dirt lot where a two-story Sears stood for decades. The building came down in June, more than seven years after the company first told the world it was leaving. If you're timing your errands around what's supposed to fill that space next, you'll be waiting a while longer. The mall's owner isn't expecting a replacement until late 2027.

Meanwhile, a few minutes away in a strip plaza most people drive past without noticing, a Wagyu barbecue restaurant opened, filled up, and became part of the regular rotation. A conveyor-belt hot pot spot down the street from it did the same thing. Cerritos is running on two different clocks right now, and knowing which one governs which part of town explains a lot about why the city feels like it's simultaneously stuck and busy.

Seven and a Half Years From Closing Sign to Bulldozer

Sears announced it was shutting the Cerritos location in the fall of 2018, part of a wave of 142 store closures nationwide. The doors closed that December. The building itself didn't come down until June of this year, meaning it sat empty for the better part of a decade before anyone touched it. The mall's ownership group has said the site won't reopen until sometime in late 2027, which puts the total gap between closing sign and grand reopening somewhere around nine years.

Sears isn't the only hole in the mall's roster. Forever 21 closed in 2025 as part of a round of a dozen Southern California store closures, leaving a second anchor space dark. None of this means Los Cerritos Center is struggling. Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang's, North Italia, and Lazy Dog are all still doing business as usual inside the same property, and the mall remains one of the busiest retail draws in southeast Los Angeles County. What it does mean is that when a project is big enough, big-box footprint, department-store scale, full redevelopment plan, the timeline stretches into years almost no matter who's in charge of it.

Three New Kitchens Opened While the Dirt Sat There

That's what makes the last twelve months so interesting to watch. While the Sears pad sat fenced off, a handful of restaurant openings moved through the leasing and permitting process at a completely different pace.

• Chubby Cattle, a Wagyu barbecue concept known for its conveyor belts and beef sourced from the company's own ranches, opened at Plaza 183 on 183rd Street.
• Seapot, which combines Korean barbecue with a rotating hot pot line, is now open on South Street in Diamond Crest Plaza, seating guests seven days a week.
• Tokyo Central/Marukai, a Japanese grocery and specialty market, is still not open. The city first previewed it at the mayor's State of the City address in June 2025 as "opening later this year." By that September, the timeline had already slipped to "next year." As of now, no grand-opening date has been announced.

That third item is the useful contradiction here. Tokyo Central/Marukai isn't going into a mall anchor box, it's headed for the former Pacific Sales space inside Cerritos Towne Center, a smaller and more ordinary retail center that also carries IHOP, Dimassi's Mediterranean Buffet, and Wood Ranch. But a full grocery buildout, refrigeration, produce sections, a prepared foods counter, takes a different amount of construction and permitting than a single restaurant tenant improvement, and it's taking correspondingly longer. Location isn't what decides how fast something opens in this city. Project size is.

The Steakhouse That Just Cleared City Hall

The clearest proof of that shows up in the mall itself. Just last week, the Cerritos City Council approved plans for a LongHorn Steakhouse at Los Cerritos Center.

The Cerritos City Council signed off on the LongHorn Steakhouse project on August 25, 2026, less than a week before this was written.

That's a single-tenant restaurant approval moving through the same city government, on the same property, as the stalled Sears redevelopment, and it's moving at outparcel speed rather than anchor-box speed. A steakhouse lease doesn't require the years of planning that a former department store site does. It needs a building pad, a kitchen buildout, and sign-off, and that process can clear the council in a matter of months. The dirt where Sears stood and the spot where LongHorn is headed sit on the same mall property, but they're not running on the same schedule, and they never were going to.

A Dairy Town Marking Its Anniversary While the Dirt Settles

There's a fitting backdrop to all of this. Cerritos was originally incorporated in 1956 as Dairy Valley, named for the dairy farms that once covered the area, before the city took its current name in 1967. This year the city dedicated a new sculpture at the Civic Center, "Milking Time: A Tribute to Dairy Valley," and kicked off a 70th Anniversary 5K Run/Walk and Health Expo to mark seven decades since incorporation. Both moves lean into the kind of slow, deliberate civic memory-keeping that takes months to plan and lands once, on purpose, the same register as a mall redevelopment plan drawn up years in advance.

The city itself is home to just over 48,000 residents and more than 1,600 businesses, according to its own January 2026 accounting, small enough that a single restaurant opening or a single council vote gets noticed by the people who live nearby. That's part of why the contrast is so visible here in a way it might not be in a larger city. A steakhouse can clear the council in the same season a cleared department store pad is still sitting empty a few hundred feet away, and you feel both timelines at once because you're driving past all of it on the same errand run.

If you've been wondering why some corners of Cerritos seem to change overnight while others sit untouched for years, that's your answer. It's not about which part of town gets attention and which gets ignored. It's about which kind of project you're watching. A restaurant lease moves in months. A department store redevelopment moves in years, sometimes the better part of a decade. Cerritos is currently running both timelines in full view, on the same stretch of South Street, and neither one is wrong. They're just different clocks.

If you're curious what any of this means for property values, timing, or what to expect if you're weighing a move in or out of Cerritos, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this market closely. Gina Oddo has been tracking Orange County and southeast Los Angeles County communities like this one for years, and she's happy to talk through what's actually changing here versus what's just taking its time. Let's Connect.