Saying goodbye to Value City

Only three things are almost guaranteed to send me into a hissy fit and maim you if you're the offender:

1. Marring my wood floors with indentations from the exposed nail on the heel of your shoe,

2. Purposefully stepping on any given pair of my purple boots and

3. Touching my plum faux-fur jacket from Value City.

I probably shouldn't get so upset about the floors - that's what sanding and buffing machines are for, right? I can find purple boots fairly easily, too. But the plum fur coat? That's not something seen every day.

I snagged it during a marathon shopping spree with one of my best friends, Mary Irby-Jones, in Dayton, Ohio, some 10 years ago. We went straight crazy.

In addition to the fur jacket, I bought a full-length eggplant swing coat; a plum, hip-length coat; a butterscotch-gold peacoat; and a winter-white peacoat - all for around $200. And now that Value City Department Stores has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced plans to liquidate stock at its remaining stores, I'll have to enshrine the fur jacket. I'd be hard-pressed to come upon such plush fashion at $39.99.

No timetable has been announced for when the Virginia Beach location will shut down, but employees and store management say the store is closing. The liquidation sale is now at 25 to 40 percent off, as it is at the Newport News store. The chain's demise will leave a huge void for bargain-conscious consumers hesitant to sacrifice quality. Sure, there are other off-price retailers such as Burlington Coat Factory, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, but there is an ease about shopping at Value City. I look for one in every major city I visit. The stores are spacious, organized and well-stocked.

And the prices are hard to beat; you feel like you've hit the lottery after leaving the register. Saturday, among other bargains, I got an eggplant toilet-lid cover for 37 cents! You heard me. Thirty-seven cents after the 25 percent markdown, which means it was only 49 cents to begin with.

A dozen or so of us Value City diehards had congregated outside the store at Virginia Beach Boulevard and Witchduck Road in Virginia Beach a half hour before it opened. The rainstorm had passed, but our eagerness to be among the first inside to snap up liquidation bargains was weighted with a cloud of disappointment. Our happy days would soon be over.

"We stay right behind here in the townhouses, said Shanel Washington, who was at the store with her husband, James. "We've been coming here for years. They have a lot of brand-name stuff for cheap."

I asked if the couple had a dollar figure on how much they planned to spend.

Shanel shook her head no. "That's one thing we didn't have to worry about here, and that's a budget."

Value City was James' first choice for his 7-year-old son's clothing, he said, but for him personally, the men's suits were a big lure. He said he recently bought a designer suit there for $80. Other times he'd find deals on suits, two for $150.

Is that an "amen" I hear from the gents?

"As far as suits, they had a great variety - Italian, American.... I'm a suit man," a dapper Sam Simmons of Virginia Beach said. "I have over 100 suits. But you can come here and get an Italian suit for $199 that would cost you $600, $700 on sale somewhere else.

"For men's suits, it was the best-kept secret in Virginia. Period."

Barbara Conn of Seaford, Del., liked the novelty of the merchandise.

"You know how it's hard to find certain things for kids?" Conn asked, pointing to her 7-year-old granddaughter, Ahliviah Girouard. Conn was in town with her son, who was doing street advertising of the store's closing.

Conn spoke enthusiastically about the time she found a purple sweater and a beige one for Ahliviah for $4.99 each at Value City. "I was shocked to hear they're closing."

The store's closing will be like parting with family, Michele Davis of Virginia Beach said. "I used to get all kinds of clothes here. I know everybody who works here. I bought a $465 handbag for $65. I mean, J. Renee shoes.

"The people were always nice. I'm really going to miss this place. It's sad. To find petites, they were the only place I could go to other than Dillard's."

Right on time at 10 a.m. Saturday, the doors opened. Time out for chit-chatting. Let's not make this into a funeral. Look at it as a celebration of life. Snap up what you can while you can, which was the message I could overhear women on their cell phones relating to their girlfriends and husbands.

Some two weeks after the news broke about the retailer going bust, I have yet to understand how this chain, of all chains, failed because of declining sales and the credit crunch. Twenty dollars went a long, long way there. Are we that broke?

Pretty soon, we'll be back in loincloths. The countdown begins when the lights go off for good at Value City.

Until then, I'm wearing my fur jacket to the end. Archaeologists will come upon it one day, along with the beloved Value City receipt from the day I bought it.

They can preserve the receipt, but they'd better not touch my jacket.

Jamesetta Walker, (757) 446-2211, jamesetta.walker@pilotonline.com