PORT ANGELES — Today, the last day Country Aire Natural Foods will do business at 117 E. First St., store co-owner Robyn Miletich will be taking care of business, or “TCB-ing,” as she called it earlier this week.
Her cramped store with limited parking will close at its present location at 7 p.m. and reopen as the newly named and palatially spacious Country Aire Natural Foods Market at 8 a.m. Tuesday 11/2 blocks west at First and Oak streets.
Along with a crew of loyal workers, including Miletich’s husband, daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, Miletich has been transforming the first floor of the former — and three-years-vacant — 38,800-square-foot Gottschalks building into what floor supervisor Martha Dixon said earlier this week will be a “destination place.”
“We need something like this in town,” Dixon said earlier this week as she priced items in the new store’s incense and candle room, which is closed off from the rest of the store to accommodate scent-sensitive customers.
“I’ve been talking to a lot of people, and they like having a destination place like this,” Dixon said as she used the store’s new bar-coded pricing system.
“This is supporting the local economy,” Dixon added.
Miletich and her husband, John, purchased the building for $650,000 from the K.O. Erickson Charity Trust on July 5 as a new home for Country Aire, a downtown mainstay for 37 years.
More inventory
The new store will include five times more inventory, Miletich said, and six times the produce as the old store.
It will carry bulk peanut butter and teas.
It will have juice- and wheat-grass-drink stations, a pot-bellied stove, six cash registers, individual bar-stool and group table seating, Wi-Fi access and a “kids zone” play area.
It also will feature a delicatessen run by Miletich’s daughter, Jaima Martin, and a health and beauty aids counter run by Miletich’s granddaughter, Kyla Martin.
Broad awning
Its presence will be announced by a broad awning that will wrap around the First and Oak street sides of the store, installed with help from a $10,000 city of Port Angeles Facade and Signage Improvement Grant.
“The store was out of room, and now we have all this space,” Miletich said late Wednesday afternoon as shelves waited to be filled.
The day after she and John purchased the building, “we walked in and said something needs to be done,” she said as about a dozen workers scurried about.
“There were white walls, pink columns and a low ceiling,” she said.
They discovered the low ceiling hid massive beams that crisscrossed 18 feet above the cement floor.
Every beam was sanded and treated.
To properly fill the floor space, Miletich said she created scale-size cutouts of every rack, counter, table and chair, and shuffled the scraps of paper around so everything fit just right.
“I just started mapping it out and started figuring where everything would go,” she said.
General manager Sam Nugent has an expansive name for Miletich’s creation.
“The map of the new world, I call it,” he said Thursday.
Nugent said that once the old store shuts down tonight, the moving trucks will start rolling.
“We’ll be like an ant team,” Nugent said.
The move is expected to last through Saturday, with training for staff — the employee workforce has grown from 17 to about 50 — slated for Sunday and Monday.
Then Tuesday, the public will be introduced to Country Aire’s “new world.”
The prospect has Miletich a little on edge, she said, but not so much that she can resist making light of the fact that the new, improved version of Country Aire will open Mayday — May 1.
“I hope I have flowers at the door instead of Mayday exclamation point, Mayday exclamation point,” she quipped.
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5060, or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
