After 18 years on Springfield Ave., Mavis Saunders is saying goodbye to the strip.
Surrounded by half-empty shelves and window signs advertising clearance sales, Ms. Saunders is shuttering her business, Mavis Collections, after nearly two decades on the same main business strip in Maplewood.
Like many around the region and throughout the country, she said the economic crisis forced her to shut her doors for good.
“This downturn was the last straw,” she said.
Ms. Saunders opened Mavis Collections during the first Bush’s tenure in the White House, in a shop she shared with five other vendors on the corner of Springfield and Chancellor Avenues. She ran her shop as a niche store that sold hats, scarves, accessories and African sculptures and carvings.
“Having my own business was always my passion,” Ms. Saunders said, packing figurines carved in chocolate-colored wood into boxes as a stereo played a blues station. Freddie King‘s classic, “I’m Tore Down,” reverberated throughout the small shop as she packed.
Around 2000 Ms. Saunders moved from the east end of Springfield Avenue west to 1908 Springfield, near a Chinese restaurant. Though the space was bigger than her previous one and allowed her more room to display her wares, climbing rent forced her to look for a smaller location.
She found one, almost directly across the street at 1919 Springfield, and moved there in 2007.
It was here she would make her last stand.
Ms. Saunders said she realized just after Christmas that she would have to give up her shop.
“A lot of customers came in before Christmas,” she said. “But everybody was buying smaller items, nobody was coming in to spend $100, they were spending $20.”
She said she already had some debt. Then, in June, a new landlord bought her building and raised her rent. In addition the new landlord forced her to pay for heat, which had been included under her old rent arrangement. In one month she paid almost $600 in heat. The cost of her new rent plus heat was more than twice her previous expenses.
“I was in debt and looking to Christmas to help pull me out,” she said.
Ms. Saunders said the closing of her store would eliminate a treasured spot that was highly valued by a specific niche of customers. Now, patrons will likely have to scour the Internet to find the types of African-centric merchandise formerly found at Mavis Collections.
“A lot of my customers tell me, ‘You can’t go,’” she said. “It’s sad when you have to leave your neighborhood to buy a gift for tomorrow morning.”
Ms. Saunders’ daughter, Michelle White, 43, helped box up the shop’s remaining merchandise and lamented the fact that for years she helped her mother run a shop on Springfield Avenue.
“I thought this place was perfect,” she said. “Because I would even come up here and do a little shopping.”
Ms. Saunders said she would continue to sell her items both on eBay and at trade shows and festivals around the country.
“Some place where you don’t have to bring the money back to the landlord and hope it’s enough,” she said.
