Rheem Valley's New Grocery Store Missed Its Own Deadline. Del Rey's Sunday Habit Isn't Waiting.

How many grocery stores have occupied that stretch of Moraga Road before the one under construction right now even opens its doors?

If you shop at Rheem Valley Shopping Center, the answer is at least five, going back to 1954. That history matters this September, because the newest addition to that list, a Grocery Outlet at 580 Moraga Road, broke ground in November 2025 with a mid-2026 opening target. Mid-2026 has come and gone. The building is still fenced. And if you live in Del Rey, close enough to Rheem Valley to treat it as your default errand run, you've probably already stopped checking the sign for a date.

That's not a complaint about slow construction. It's a pattern this specific shopping center has followed for seven decades, and understanding it changes how you read the delay.

Five grocery stores, seven decades, one habit

Rheem Valley didn't get its first grocery store until Clark's Market opened when the center did, in 1954. Over the following decades, that same retail footprint cycled through Petrini's in 1986, then Apple Market, before the space eventually became Home Goods. A separate storefront went from Safeway to TJ Maxx. What is now the Saint Mary's College annex space started out as a Lucky Store. The Rheem Valley Bowl, built in 1960 by Donald L. Rheem, hosted leagues and bumper bowling for nearly 40 years before closing in 1999. The building itself wasn't demolished until 2004, and the lot then sat vacant for another eight years before medium-density housing finally broke ground. Lamorinda Weekly's own retrospective on the center's history, published in January 2026, put it plainly: grocery tenants here have never had staying power, and reinvention has always run on the property's own schedule, not on a public timeline anyone could count on.

So when the Grocery Outlet groundbreaking happened last November, with Moraga's mayor and the store's chairman of the board on hand, it fit a familiar shape. The chairman, who lives in Lafayette, joked that he'd soon only have to drive four miles to shop at one of his own stores. The property owner called it a catalyst for the rest of the center. Both were describing the start of construction, not a finished result, and the distinction has turned out to matter.

The three stages nobody outside sees move

The build was always supposed to happen in three parts: underground work first, meaning site prep, utilities, and foundation, then construction of the 17,404-square-foot building itself, and finally the interior work, shelving, registers, the details that turn a shell into a store. As of a June 2026 report from Lamorinda Weekly, that mid-2026 opening promised at the groundbreaking was already behind schedule, based on the visible state of construction at the site. A spokesperson for the property owner acknowledged crews were pushing to catch up, but no revised completion date was given.

No outlet covering Moraga has reported a revised opening since. If you've been driving past the fencing all summer and wondering whether you missed an announcement, you didn't. The store simply isn't open yet, and nobody local has said when it will be.

What's already open while you wait

The useful thing to remember is that Rheem Valley was never a ghost town waiting on one tenant. While the grocery build sits behind schedule, the rest of the center has kept functioning, and some of it has kept changing on its own:

• TJ Maxx, CVS, Dollar Tree, and Home Goods remain the anchor stores for daily needs
• The space that opened as New Delhi Bistro in 2012 has since cycled through a vegetarian concept called Bagaan and, more recently, a Cal-Mex restaurant called Casa Turing
• F45 Training opened in a space that used to house Mycra Pac
• Moraga Jewelers relocated within the center to make room for the Grocery Outlet construction, rather than closing

None of that is dramatic. It's the same low-grade turnover the center has absorbed for decades, just happening while a bigger project sits unfinished next door. If your errand list runs through Rheem Valley on a Tuesday, you're not waiting on anything. The stores you already use are open.

The market that never needed groundbreaking

The one weekly fixture that hasn't paused for any of this is a few minutes away, at the corner of Moraga Way and Moraga Road. The Moraga Farmers' Market runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with more than 40 local farmers and food vendors setting up regardless of what's happening across town at the shopping center. It doesn't have a construction timeline to miss, because it doesn't need a building.

Fall is when the market's calendar gets more specific. Its Halloween Harvest Festival and costume parade are annual fixtures, alongside a Grape Escape event earlier in the year and a Cherry Festival and Watermelon Festival in summer. For families in Del Rey, this is less a special outing and more a standing appointment, the kind of Sunday morning that happens whether or not a new sign has gone up on Moraga Road.

That's worth sitting with. The most anticipated retail change in this corner of Lamorinda in years is still not open, and it's easy to read that as a gap in the neighborhood's food access. It isn't. The market has been filling that role every week, on its own schedule, the entire time the grocery store has been under construction. When the new store does open, whenever that turns out to be, it will add a sixth name to a list that already includes Clark's Market, Petrini's, Apple Market, and Safeway. It won't be the thing that finally lets Del Rey residents shop and eat locally. That's already been happening on Sundays, rain or shine, festival or no festival.

What this actually tells you about living here

Rheem Valley's pattern isn't unique because it's slow. It's unique because the slowness has never actually cost the neighborhood anything. Every tenant change, every years-long redevelopment gap, every missed opening date has happened against a backdrop of a shopping center and a farmers market that kept the essentials covered regardless. If you're the kind of person who tracks these things, the honest update is simple: the Grocery Outlet isn't open, nobody has said when it will be, and the rest of your week hasn't changed because of it.

That's the version of this story you won't find in a press release. It's also the version that actually matters if you live within walking distance of Del Rey Elementary and drive past that fencing every week wondering the same thing your neighbors are wondering.

If there's a next update on the Grocery Outlet's timeline, or on whatever comes next for Rheem Valley, it will likely surface the same way this one did: in the pages of Lamorinda Weekly, not in a corporate announcement. Worth a bookmark if you want to know before the sign changes.

For more on what's actually changing across Lamorinda, from shopping centers to school-adjacent neighborhoods, Alexis Thompson keeps a running local read on the towns she's worked in since 2007. If you're curious what your own Del Rey home might be worth in today's market, her free home valuation tool is a good place to start, no waiting on construction required.