A small-town department store in North Carolina shuttered after 117 years.
The venerable retailer, which has sold everything from horse collars to baby shoes, couldn’t survive the pandemic: its fourth-generation owner recently announced that he was closing the business. By Amy Haimerl
Harrell’s Department Store has stood sentry over Wright Street in Burgaw, North Carolina, for the past 117 years. It has served the town’s 4,000 residents with everything they’ve needed, like baby shoes and horse collars in the original wooden building, or church hats and appliances in the twostory red brick building constructed in 1924.
Harrell’s has been the backdrop to several famous late-1990s and early2000s movies, including I Know What You Did Last Summer and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It has survived changing fashions — it once sold long johns — world wars, the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis, and floods.
But it couldn’t survive the coronavirus. Vernon Harrell, the company’s fourth-generation owner, recently announced he was closing the business his great-grandfather started.
“It’s been very difficult,” said Harrell, 65, who started working in the store when he was 13. “I did not want to be the one who brought it to an end.”
The pandemic has devastated many of the country’s small-business owners; nearly a quarter of companies closed either temporarily or permanently in March and April, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
But for firms that have been part of their communities for 100 years or more, there’s more at stake than livelihood — there’s legacy and, in some cases, generations of family ties.
Harrell was struggling to keep the department store going even before the coronavirus hit. Changing consumer tastes and competition from big-box stores such as Home Depot were cutting into his revenue.
He had already given up selling flooring materials and floor coverings — something Harrell’s had sold from the beginning — because he couldn’t be competitive.
But he was also trying to modernise: Harrell started a website and put the store on social media, and he considered adding a bar to the store to give customers another reason to shop.
“If Covid hadn’t hit, I would have kept going even though I would have struggled,” Harrell said. “It was the loss of the income for the two months that really just crippled me.”
Instead, he’s trying to give his family’s business a good death — especially because he never anticipated being the one in charge.
Harrell left the family business after college to go into the film industry, which was booming in nearby Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 1990s thanks to state and local tax breaks.
While he went off to work as a prop master, his younger brother, Herbert, took over both the department store and the family’s funeral business.
(Yes, a funeral home. Harrell’s originally sold coffins in its furniture department, and the brothers’ grandfather developed that into a second business in 1913.)
“My dad had two more sons, so he said, ‘It’s all or nothing; you take both businesses or nothing,’” Harrell said. “I didn’t want to run the funeral home, so I left.”
When the film industry began drying up, Harrell and his family moved back to Burgaw. His father, Charles Meacham Harrell Sr, and brother offered him a job in the store doing appliance repair, paperwork, sales and whatever else needed doing.
That was his life, with the occasional film production, until his father died in 2016. At that time, the two brothers split the businesses; Harrell took over the department store while his brother took the funeral home, which will remain open.
Today, Harrell spends his days thinking about the future. He hopes to find a way to bring new life to the brick storefront. He’d like to see a vibrant entertainment venue with a bar and small boutiques renting space.
Some of the nearby storefronts have been redeveloped, and Harrell, who is
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If Covid hadn’t hit, I would have kept going even though I would have struggled. VERNON HARRELL Owner of Harrell’s Department Store
on the town council, like his father and grandfather before him, can feel that Burgaw is at a crucial moment.
“I want to put something in that will keep the name on the window,” he said.
One challenge facing family businesses is that there often isn’t anyone who wants to take over — especially during an economic downturn.
Harrell’s adult sons live six hours away in Asheville, North Carolina, and aren’t interested in re-imagining retail for a post-Covid world. Neither are his nieces and nephews.
“There isn’t the next generation with the passion to take the business through a crisis,” said Jennifer Pendergast, executive director of the Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University. “This is going to be hard for a while. Is there someone who wants to take that on?”
For business owners trying to chart the future — whether they’re the fifth generation or the second — she recommends that they find someone who can be their “truth teller,” who will look at the numbers and the emotions of continuing.
“If the math doesn’t work and the business isn’t viable, there’s no point in keeping it alive. But if it is, then she encourages owners to ask themselves if the work is still meaningful to the family.
“Obligation cannot be the reason to continue,” Pendergast said. “Long term, that is not sustainable.”