Drive down Farrington Highway past 94-144, the old address of Waipahu's Don Quijote, and you will find a stretch of chain-link fence where a supermarket used to be. The building has sat empty since the last Don Quijote closed its doors on Dec. 31, 2024, after nearly three decades of business in the space. For most of 2025, it was just a vacant lot with a forgettable backstory. This year it became something else: the site of one of Waipahu's more contentious civic arguments, and a stand-in for a much bigger question about what this stretch of Farrington Highway is supposed to become now that the Skyline rail line runs nearby.

The short version, the one that made local news in June, is that Costco wants to build Hawaii's first Costco Business Center on the site, and the plan would likely mean the end of the road for the Zippy's next door. That framing is accurate as far as it goes. But sit through the actual meeting where residents raised these concerns, and a different story surfaces. This isn't a simple fight over one restaurant. It's a preview of how Waipahu decides, block by block, whether its commercial strip stays built around cars or starts building around the train.

A different kind of Costco for a different kind of building

Costco Business Centers are not the warehouse stores most people picture. There are 30 of them nationwide, and unlike a standard Costco, they cater specifically to businesses buying in bulk rather than families doing a weekly shop. A Costco representative brought a new site animation to a Waipahu Neighborhood Board meeting in late May, and the plan calls for tearing down the vacant building and constructing something new in its place, with a fuel station that Costco's own director of real estate development, Christine Lasley, said would be larger than the company's existing Iwilei location.

That detail matters because it reframes the scale of what's proposed. This isn't a modest infill project replacing one closed grocery store. It's a business-format warehouse with what would be one of the largest fuel operations on the island, on a parcel that already has a legacy tenant sitting on part of it.

Here's a quick timeline of how the site got here:

• 1995 — The property opens as Daiei, a supermarket format that was already a throwback to old-school Hawaii retail by the time it closed.
• 2006 — New ownership rebrands the store as Don Quijote.
• Dec. 31, 2024 — The ground lease ends and Don Quijote closes the Waipahu location for good, pointing West Oahu shoppers toward the Pearl City store or the newer DonPen Times in Kunia.
• Late May 2026 — Costco presents its Business Center concept for the site to the Waipahu Neighborhood Board, and the debate that follows makes local news for the first time.

The neighbor no one at the table wanted to lose

The complication is that Zippy's sits on the same property, and it has been part of Waipahu life far longer than the supermarket that just closed. In a statement sent to Hawaii News Now, the company said it has been "proudly serving the Waipahu community for 55 years" and hopes to keep doing so.

At the board meeting, Zippy's vice president of marketing, Kevin Yim, was direct about what a move would actually mean for the chain. He said there's "no place we can move along Farrington Highway that is exactly the same as where we are now," and that the company hopes to stay exactly where it is.

Lasley's response, when pressed by a board member who told her she'd "have a fight on your hands," was almost as telling as Yim's. She said Costco has to work that out with its developer, adding a line that undercuts any tidy version of this story where everyone gets to stay: "there's not enough room for all of us to exist."

That is not a company spokesperson soft-pedaling a land dispute. That's an admission that this specific parcel cannot hold both a Costco Business Center at the scale being proposed and a standalone Zippy's. Something has to give, and neither side pretended otherwise.

The meeting where the traffic argument became the real argument

Once the board opened the floor, the conversation shifted from "which business survives" to "what does this corridor become." One resident pointed to the congestion already familiar near Costco's Oahu locations during school hours and peak commute times, saying they welcomed the idea of another gas option but not the traffic that comes with it.

Costco representatives pushed back on the traffic framing, arguing that a Business Center draws a different customer than a standard warehouse location, with what Lasley called "less single-family consumer traffic." Whether that holds up once a larger fuel station opens on a busy highway is the kind of thing residents will only be able to judge once cars are actually lined up at the pumps.

What the meeting didn't resolve, and what no one on either side directly addressed, is the question raised a week later in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser letter to the editor: why is a business-format warehouse and gas station going up on a parcel that sits near a Skyline transit station in the first place?

The question nobody at the podium answered

The letter writer's argument is worth sitting with, whether or not you land where they do. They pointed out that Waipahu was built by immigrants who worked the sugar mill and cane fields, transforming a rural plantation town into the neighborhood it is today, and argued that when planning discussions for this site first began, the vision on the table was mixed-use residential and commercial development, the kind the Skyline line was built to support. Instead of housing that lets people walk to a train station, the site is on track to get what the letter's author called Oahu's largest gas station, positioned next to foot traffic from commuters getting on and off the rail.

That's the part of this story that the neighborhood board meeting never fully got to, because board meetings are built for zoning specifics and traffic projections, not for asking whether a decades-old grocery store lease should get replaced by more of the same car-dependent retail pattern or by something the transit investment was actually designed to enable.

It's also not the first time a Farrington Highway anchor tenant has closed and reopened as something entirely different. When the Outback Steakhouse near Waipio closed, the space didn't stay empty long. It reopened as 916 Grill St. + ShabuZen, a dual-format yakiniku and hot pot restaurant that's become one of the newer names locals mention when asked where to eat. That turnover shows Waipahu's commercial strip is used to reinvention. What makes the Don Quijote site different is the scale of what's proposed and its proximity to rail infrastructure that didn't exist the last time a major anchor here changed hands.

What to actually watch for

As of this writing, there's no confirmed approval date or final site plan, just a proposal that Costco says is moving forward and a neighborhood board that made its skepticism known without derailing the process. If you live near this corridor, the things worth tracking aren't abstract: whether Zippy's ends up staying on-site in some form, what final size the fuel station lands at, and whether the county attaches any conditions related to pedestrian access from the nearby rail station. Those details, more than any renderings Costco has shown so far, will decide whether this becomes a story about convenient fuel prices or a missed chance to build the kind of neighborhood the Skyline line was supposed to make possible.

Waipahu has absorbed bigger changes than this one before. What's unusual is having a front-row seat to the argument this time, instead of just finding out after the fact what got built.

If you're weighing decisions about a Waipahu property of your own, whether that's an apartment building on this same stretch of Farrington Highway or somewhere else on Oahu, Commercial Investment Strategies tracks these local shifts because they shape what a building is worth long before an appraisal ever does. What's your property worth?