The owners of Lakefield’s newest Main Street business wonder why buy new, when used will do?
Donna Dammer of Rushmore and Mary Krumwiede of Bingham Lake opened their new store, Useable Stuff Thrift Store at 309 Main St. in uptown Lakefield earlier this week. The store carries a wide variety of useable stuff, from household items to clothes for every member of the family. The store also sells shoes and boots, bedding and bath items, pictures, knickknacks, lamps and other small furniture pieces, small appliances, wall and wicker décor, some sporting equipment, lots of toys and tons of kitchen items, plus new items arriving all the time, Dammer said.
“We are a consignment store,” Krumwiede said. “People can bring in items to sell; we price them and sell the items for them. We are looking forward to doing business in Lakefield and the people we have met so far have been very nice. In fact, people wanted to bring in items for us to sell even before we were ready to open and kept asking us when we would be opening our store.”
“I previously ran a store similar to this in Luverne,” Dammer said. “There were three other consignment or thrift stores in that town and we all had good traffic. It seems when people come to shop one consignment store, they shop them all. I look at it as a new version of the department store. If a person shops one consignment or thrift store and doesn’t find what they are looking for at that store, they shop the other ones to see if they can find what they are looking for there. We know that there are two other consignment or thrift stores here in Lakefield, but when you know you have got the people that shop in stores such as this, that is where you have got to go. We felt this was a busy, friendly town and that we could all complement each other’s business.”
“We had looked around at others as possible locations for our store but the overhead was just too high or they didn’t have anything for rent at all. Some had a strong business community and good retail traffic, but no space available,” Krumwiede added. “We found this building was available in Lakefield, investigated the traffic here, liked what we saw and rented it.”
Useable Stuff Thrift Store will be open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day.
“Those are our summer hours,” Dammer said. “We will be extending our hours this fall and will be open Saturdays, at least in the mornings to start with.”
Since Dammer closed her Luverne location, she had plenty of equipment to furnish the new store with clothes racks and shelving, too, and prior to their opening, the two spent a lot of time getting their story ready and filling those clothes racks with a huge variety of items.
“I wanted to be closer to my relatives living in this area,” Dammer said. “Mary is my niece. That is one of the main reason I wanted to move back to this area.”
“I managed a truck stop for 18 years in Windom previously,” Krumwiede said. “I wanted to start a consignment business and Donna wanted to move closer to this area. We decided to look for a place we could operate our consignment store and Lakefield was our choice.”
“If a person needs some extra cash, they can bring in their items and we will sell them,” Dammer said. “Our motto is, ‘Why buy new when used will do?’”
“We are looking forward to meeting all our new neighbors and making new friends and new customers of the people in Lakefield and the surrounding communities,” Krumwiede said. “We plan to have a grand opening at some later date in the near future too.”
