Goodwill opens in Winter Garden
Retail store is 4th new one since May
As a host of major retailers declare bankruptcy amid the coronavirus pandemic, Goodwill Industries of Central Florida is opening a sleek new $4.6 million retail store in Winter Garden on Thursday — the nonprofit’s fourth new retail location to open since May.
The 25,000-square-foot Winter Garden store, at 14190 W. Colonial Dr., joins architecturally similar projects in Lake Nona, Lady Lake and Viera as the charity moves to broaden its appeal to shoppers and increase revenue for career counseling, vocational training and job placement for struggling workers.
Some 90% of Goodwill’s retail revenue directly benefits those programs.
“We want our stores to be a place where everyone’s comfortable coming to shop,” said the organization’s president and CEO Edward Durkee, a veteran Goodwill executive who took the Central Florida post Jan. 1. “So we’re creating a really attractive environment for shoppers and putting [stores] in places where it’s convenient for people to shop.”
The Winter Garden location sits on 4.2 acres bought for $1.77 million last December. Like the other three new stores, it was in the planning and construction phase before COVID-19 brought the region’s economy to a standstill in March.
But Durkee said donations and sales have come back strong after having to close for six weeks under stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the virus.
“I am bullish on Central Florida,” he said. “I think that people will continue to move here. These conditions aren’t going to last forever, and we’ve bounced back better than I had anticipated already. We’ll get past this.”
Even during a recession, resale businesses are typically one of the few sectors to do well. In the Great Recession of a decade ago, nearly two-thirds of U.S. resale franchises reported an increase in sales, by an average 31 percent, according to a 2009 industry survey.
Still, the novel coronavirus has brought unique concerns to all retail operations, as stores — including those run by Goodwill — limit the number of shoppers to prevent crowding. But the shutdown also gave some residents a chance to clean out their closets, bringing a bounty of new donations to the nonprofit.
And while the agency was forced to lay off more than 1,000 of its employees in March and April, since reopening it has hired more than 800 and is still recruiting. The new Winter Garden location, for instance, has yet to fill all 45 positions needed to staff the store.
“We pay above minimum wage and we have career ladders,” Durkee said. “We want people to grow in their employment.”
All Goodwill locations have adopted new safety protocols, including requiring all customers to wear masks and all employees to wear masks and gloves. They’ve also established one-way aisles and set up plexiglass partitions at registers.
Dressing rooms will be closed.
To compensate, the return policy is being extended to 14 days.
Retail stores will be open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.