Gateway Family Services opened its resale shop last week, in a new location and with a new name, but have closed once again due to the uptick in COVID-19 cases that Scurry County experienced over the weekend.
Gateway Family Services Resale Shop Manager Shannon Mhoon said that she and the other staff were glad to be open for the time that they were able to be. She hopes that the shop’s new location will allow her and her three employees to better serve their shoppers.
“Several months ago, we got this building. We’ve been needing a new building for 20 years,” she laughed. “The building we were in was shot. So we got the buildings but then all this mess happened, so we went ahead and closed, and we moved everything over here in the last six weeks.”
Mhoon said that even though the shop was closed, people kept making donations.
Now there are so many items that there is not enough room to display them all. That may change when they reopen, though, since the shop stayed busy last week.
“People are so good about donating to us. I’ve been here 10 years, and we’ve never been short of donations,” she said. “But we don’t have room to put it all out there. It’s toys, bedding, housewares, shoes, clothes. It’s like Black Friday when we open the doors. We have good prices, so we stay busy.”
Although volunteers and community service workers help at the store, Mhoon said that the moving process was limited to employees in order to follow social distancing guidelines.
Mhoon said that for a long time, people did not associate Noah’s Attic with Gateway Family Services, which brought about the shop’s name change.
“People would take their donations over to Gateway, but they don’t take them there,” she said. “We’re hoping that since we’ve renamed the store, people will bring them here, because this is where they actually go. The name change was mainly for that, so that people would realize that this is Gateway Family Services, too.”
All of the shop’s proceeds benefit Gateway’s shelter.
“When the women come to the shelter, sometimes they have nothing, but they come over here and bring us a voucher from Gateway and can get whatever they need,” Mhoon said. “That was the main reason for this.”
The Gateway Family Services Resale Shop is located at 3205 College Ave. and is normally open on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. However, for the time being, that schedule has been put on hold. Donations may still be left in tubs in the back of the building at any time, but Mhoon said that they prefer to take them on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays when employees are working.
“We have been blessed here, and God has always been in this building with us,” Mhoon said. “He was in Noah’s Attic, and we did pray over this building before we moved in as well, so He’s here with us, too.”