A walk through the mall turns up new stores

There are several new stores scattered around West Park Mall. Some are here for the holiday season, some are permanent additions and some may prove themselves viable by showing strong holiday sales.

I took a stroll through the mall Saturday afternoon, locating the stores announced in an e-mail from mall marketing director Lindsey Church and stopping to talk with store owners and managers. Of the seven retailers named in Church's e-mail, all but one are open for business.

The new retailers include:

• Kitchen Collections in the J.C. Penney wing. This chain store offers kitchen gadgets. tools and accessories. "People love their little kitchen doodaddie things," said Janice Thomas of Scott City, the store's manager. "They stop in here, sometimes for one or two items, but they say 'you can't get this anywhere else.'" Thomas said the future of the Kitchen Collections store depends on how well it does during the holiday season.
• Sportsman's Trail, also in the J.C. Penney wing. The store offers apparel and accessories geared toward hunters.
• The Picket Fence, in the Steve & Barry's wing, offering Americana home decorations. Manager Lorna Thompson said the owner, Annette Cole of Benton, Ill., has opened for the holiday season. Cole previously operated a store by the same name in Carbondale, Ill., Thompson said. The store's been open for about two weeks, Thompson said, and is showing "pretty good" sales of the home decor, folk art and rustic pieces, including one-of-a-kind wood furnithure.
• China Star Restaurant, also in the Steve & Barry's wing.
• JNP Sports, in the Steve & Barry's wing, is the new location for the three-year-old Cape Girardeau retailer previously at 810 Broadway. Johnny and Pam Carter operate the store, which offers skateboards, mixed martial arts attire from brands such as Extreme Couture, Team Punishment and Warrior Wear, among others. Rent in the mall is a lot more than Broadway, Carter said, "but we have four times the foot traffic." Carter, 27, worked for Rubbermaid in Jackson before he and his wife struck out on their own as entrepreneurs. Carter and his wife are permanent tenants at the mall, he said.
• Minor's Harley-Davidson, a kiosk at the entrance to the J.C. Penney wing, offering T-shirts and other Harley-Davidson apparel and accessories.
• Mystic Nights, a seasonal kiosk that will open Saturday.

Other recent additions to the mall, Church said, include Kicks Soccer Shop, which seems to have everything that a soccer enthusiast could need, and the Teddy Bear Connection.

The new stores give the mall a full look. As I strolled, I saw only one storefront that seemed empty and that was for Stunna's, a store that moved to another location in the mall.

• New storage business: Mark Rademaker, owner of the 5 Pines Mobile Home Park (formerly Lamplighter Mobile Home Park) said he's ready to begin building the first phase of what will be a 340-unit storage business on Boutin Road adjacent to the mobile home park. The blueprints are at city hall in Cape Girardeau, he said, and construction will begin as soon as he obtains the necessary approvals.

Rademaker, developer of Coyote Creek Estates Subdivision, said the first phase will include 76 units ranging in size from 50 to 300 square feet. The storage business will eventually include climate-controlled units as it fills in three acres south of the mobile home park.

The mobile home park is in transition as well, he said. The park is now accepting only people 55 and older, and he's cleaned up and removed about seven substandard mobile homes. The park has 96 pads, of which 43 are currently occupied, he said. Current tenants will not be evicted, he said.

"I am not going to kick people out unless they are causing problems," he said.

• Phoenicia returns: The Phoenicia Restaurant at 1000 N. Sprigg St. is reborn. Emad Salamy, one of the Salamy Twins Inc., is bringing back the restaurant he ran successfully for years.

Salamy closed the restaurant and moved to Ottawa, Ontario, to be close to his family. Since closing the restaurant, he's leased it to a series of entrepreneurs, including one that used the restaurant's name but not its original recipes for Lebanese and Mediterranean foods. "Sometimes it happens like that," Salamy said. "They used the name. They should have used the recipes."

Customers can also purchase a cookbook with Salamy's recipes. Asked if he's worried that people will buy the cookbook and make their own at home, Salamy shrugged it off. "If they like that, it is fine with me. I think they will try it and then come back. But that is why we wrote the cookbook, to introduce people to the food."

• Making a chain: I don't know if two locations count as a chain of stores, but Mike Hanners, who sells just about everything from ATVs to pavestones at his Hanners Wholesale on Highway 25 south of Jackson, is forging the second link in Cape Girardeau.

The new store at 67 Plaza Drive in the Town Plaza Shopping Center will focus on motorcycles, ATVs and accessories as a showroom to highlight some of his better-selling items, Hanners said. He plans to open for business this week.

Among those items will be Redcat and Kazuma off-road motorcycles and ATVs, as well as helmets, tools and other accessories.

The decision to open a satellite store in Cape Girardeau is an attempt to generate more business by moving closer to a larger number of customers, Hanners said. "There are a lot of people in Cape who want to get to us, but they don't shop in Jackson as much as we want them to," Hanners said.

Hanners started out in Pocahontas in 1992, moving to his current location about two miles south of Jackson on Highway 25 in 1999. If the store is a hit, Hanners said, "I will go bigger or whatever I need to do."

• Butter burgers: If there's a bit of extra traffic on North Kingshighway today, it may be because people are in line to get a taste of Culver's Butter Burgers and Frozen Custard, which opens at 10:30 a.m.

Barbara Geis, who along with her husband have moved to the area from Fon du Lac, Wis., said the restaurant is fully staffed, providing about 60 new jobs for the area, and will be ready to open today.

The Cape Girardeau location is the couple's first foray into the franchise restaurant business. They trained to run the business by working for Culver's for three years in Wisconsin, and chose Cape Girardeau after scouting out our area as well as Carbondale, Ill., Paducah, Ky., and Quincy, Ill., as possible locations.

The whole process of finding the right city took about two months, Geis said.

"We chose Cape Girardeau because the people were really friendly and it felt like home," Geis told me this morning. "It felt good. We liked the city a lot and we had something we wanted to give to the city and we wanted to do it."

• Grants awarded: The Missouri Research Corporation was awarded two grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Development program to support entrepreneurship and economic development in Southeast Missouri. The Rural Business Enterprise Grant, $87,500, will allow for expanded outreach to businesses to help with planning, loan packaging and other business challenges. The Rural Business Opportunity Grant of $50,000 will help support leadership and community economic development training.

Rudi Keller is the business editor for the Southeast Missourian. Contact him at 335-6611, extension 126