The Old Best Buy in Marquette Township Has Changed Jobs Three Times Since 2020
When Best Buy pulled out of its store on US-41 in the fall of 2020, the reasoning given wasn't complicated. Corporate cited declining economic activity and negative population trends in the area, closed the doors on October 31, and left. For a while, that was the story people repeated when they drove past the empty building: another casualty of the retail downturn, another sign that Marquette Township's box-store era was winding down.
Six years later, the same building is moving into its third occupant, and each one has represented a step up in what actually happens inside it. This isn't a story about a building sitting empty. It's a story about one address on US-41 quietly tracking how the township's commercial corridor is changing jobs, and pulling other buildings along with it every time it moves.
If you've lived near this stretch of US-41 for a while, you've probably clocked the signage changes without connecting them into a single thread. Here's the sequence, laid out plainly:
| Year | Tenant | What It Was |
|---|---|---|
| Through 2020 | Best Buy | Consumer electronics big-box retail |
| 2022 to roughly 2025 | Ride North Powersports & Marine | Outdoor recreation retail, part of a multi-business expansion by owners Sarah and Jordan Wolfenberg |
| 2026, move underway | Mount Mfg | FDA-registered medical device manufacturer, expanding into the space |
Each row on that table is a different kind of economy. The first is a national retailer pulling out because the math stopped working. The second is a local couple betting on outdoor recreation demand. The third is a certified manufacturer building implants and surgical instruments. Same square footage, same road, three very different answers to the question of what Marquette Township is good for.
Ride North's arrival in the old Best Buy space wasn't a standalone move. Sarah and Jordan Wolfenberg, who already owned other businesses in the area, used the purchase to rebrand and expand what they'd been calling their outdoor recreation lineup. That single decision set off a chain reaction across three other buildings: they sold their UP Kubota building and shifted that business into the Marquette Powersports location, then opened a new Ride North Campers operation in the former Shopko building at Country Village in west Ishpeming.
One purchase, four buildings changing hands. That's the pattern worth noticing here. Nothing in this corridor seems to sit still on its own. When one tenant moves, it tends to leave a trail.
By 2025, Ride North had moved on from the former Best Buy building too, opening the door for its next chapter.
In September 2025, Jesse Nye of Mount Mfg proposed relocating his company into the vacated Ride North building on US-41. The Marquette Township Planning Commission was unanimously in favor, and the plan cleared a public hearing that October. Nye described the new space as roughly three times the size of Mount Mfg's existing facility, enough room to support four to eight years of growth without needing to expand again.
Mount Mfg isn't a startup testing the waters. The company was founded downstate in 2015 and relocated its headquarters to Marquette in 2022 under CEO Eric Lintula, who grew up in the area and studied engineering at Northern Michigan University. It's ISO13485:2016 certified and FDA registered, and it manufactures medical devices and instruments for the orthopedic spine and extremity markets. Nye put the company's outlook plainly when he talked about the move:
"We really view Mount Mfg as what you might consider a forever company. We're going to continue to grow, we have just a fantastic staff. The team is unbelievable and our capabilities are very, very strong. We don't see ourselves going anywhere in the near future."
There's a broader context behind that confidence. Northern Michigan University runs a pilot program that places work scholars at three medical device manufacturers in the Marquette area, Mount Manufacturing among them, training students on CNC equipment for university credit and pay under a program NMU professor Cale Polkinghorne helped develop. That's not a detail you'd find by driving past the building. It's the difference between "a company moved in" and "a company moved in because the local workforce pipeline was already built for it."
By this spring, the Mining Journal confirmed the next link in the chain: Mount Manufacturing's expansion into the former Best Buy space opened its old building on Brookton Road for a new tenant, Cherry Creek Construction. The Marquette Township Planning Commission approved that move too, and owner Sam Holcomb described the appeal in direct terms:
"This building is something we've been eyeing for a while, and it was pretty exciting to see it come up, it's a great location. So, our hope is that this will be a headquarters for us."
Cherry Creek is planning to use the added space to expand its offerings, including the possibility of in-house design services. So the sequence now runs four deep: Best Buy out, Ride North in, Ride North out to make room for Mount Mfg, and Mount Mfg's old building immediately claimed by a construction company looking to grow. Nobody in this chain has been left holding an empty building for long.
Marquette Township built its retail identity on buildable acreage the city of Marquette couldn't offer, which is why national chains and big-box stores clustered along US-41 in the first place. That history is part of why a closure like Best Buy's felt significant in 2020. It wasn't just one store leaving, it read as a verdict on the whole corridor.
What's happened since complicates that verdict. The building didn't sit empty waiting for another electronics retailer or another national chain. It went to a locally owned recreation business, and now it's being taken over by a certified medical device manufacturer that's tied into NMU's engineering pipeline and confident enough to plan for nearly a decade of growth in its new space. The jobs inside that building now look different than the jobs Best Buy offered in 2019, and the company filling the gap behind it, Cherry Creek Construction, is doing the same thing in miniature on Brookton Road.
If you live near this stretch of the township, the practical takeaway isn't which sign is on the building this month. It's that vacancy here doesn't seem to last, and each turnover has trended toward higher-skill, higher-wage work rather than away from it. That's a different story than "another store closed," and it's one you only get by tracking what actually replaced what.
If you're watching this corridor because you're weighing your own move into or within Marquette Township, Team Erin Wasik follows this kind of local detail closely, the sort that doesn't show up on a listing sheet but shapes what a neighborhood is becoming. Start Your Search with a team that pays attention to the whole picture, not just the square footage.
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