Value Village vitalizes Valley vacancy

WASILLA — The green-roofed strip mall on the west side of town commonly called the Shop-Rite Mall has been without an accurate name since the grocer shut down last year.

Thrift store chain Value Village may have changed that Thursday by opening its first store in the Valley.

“We’ve been looking for property up here for a long time,” manager and Valley resident Carl Jerue said as shoppers bustled around him that morning. “I’ve commuted for tons of years.”

Now he has a store to manage here rather than driving all the way to the big Boniface and Northern Lights store in Anchorage.

Jerue spoke between inquiries from staff — do we have any tables for the break rooms? How about mirrors for the costume section? — and from the public — bathrooms?

He said the VIP opening Wednesday saw 280 people standing outside when the store opened. Thursday morning, 180 customers were in line. He said the festivities began with a speech from Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright.

“We came on in and actually opened up about 10 minutes early,” Jerue said. “No sense in making people stand outside.”

Some facts you might not know about Value Village:

• The store is an international chain, an arm of Savers Inc. that has 270 stores under various names in the U.S., Canada and Australia, according to the chain’s website. Thursday’s opening brought trainers and other folks up from Outside.

• The Valley store is the fourth in Alaska. The company also has one in Fairbanks and two in Anchorage — one on Dimond Boulevard and that aforementioned one on Northern Lights. The Valley branch is about the size of the Dimond store.

• The stores partner with nonprofit groups. In Alaska it’s Big Brothers Big Sisters. That group takes in the donations and then sells them to the store. Jerue said that Value Village accounts for 10 percent of that organization’s revenue.

“So much of their money is from the federal grants. It’s so specific,” Jerue said. Federal grants usually come with stipulations that the money be spent for a clearly delineated purpose. The Value Village money has no such stipulation.

The Valley store has an attached donation center. Jerue said that even items that come in at the store wind up generating revenue for Big Brothers Big Sisters. Value Village buys the items sight-unseen.

“We recycle the items we can’t sell,” Jerue said.

As for hard numbers, Jerue said the store will employ 40 full-time and 10 part-time workers. Like the other branches, the store puts 5,000 new items on the floor every day, which is one reason it took most of the summer to get the place open.

“We’ve been in here in the building for six weeks processing,” he said. “It took us that long to get enough product and backstop.”

He said it took some time for the chain to find the right spot in Wasilla because there just weren’t enough open spaces big enough to handle it. Indeed, Value Village has rented the storefront next door as well as the old Shop-Rite space.

The second storefront is now the store’s costume section. After Halloween, it will do some painting and construction and expand its usual inventory into there. Wasilla isn’t lacking in retail space, but finding one the size of a grocery store is a tall order.

“This is small compared to some of our other locations,” Jerue said.

Value Village, he said, fills a niche the Valley has had, offering another option for clothes shopping that doesn’t involve a trip to Anchorage. Judging by the steady stream of shoppers Thursday, Jerue said it appears the Valley agrees with him.

“We love that the community wants us to be here,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.