PORT ANGELES — Saar’s Market Place Foods plans to close, store officials announced today.
The store east of downtown Port Angeles at 2343 East Highway 101 plans a close-out sale before shutting its doors for good.
The store has offered groceries at discount prices for several decades.
“The store is already in the close-out process,” corporate general manager John Hames said.
Hames was helping customers and employees just a few hours after a closeout sale began.
The sale is expected to last up to four weeks.
Then Saars will close for good, he said.
Twenty-five employees will lose their jobs.
The store was discount-oriented Stockmarket Foods before it was purchased by Saar’s Inc. 14 years ago, Hames said.
Was Saar’s affected by the October 2010 opening of the Walmart Supercenter — which includes a large discount-priced grocery store area — about a mile east of Saar’s?
“I would say the comment would be that additional competition is too much for Port Angeles,” Hames said.
“It was already ‘overstored,’ ‘overstored’ before additional competition came in.”
Hames said Oak Harbor-based Saar’s Inc.’s nine other stores in Washington are in no danger of closing.
But other trouble may be brewing for Saar’s Inc., suggested Tom Geiger, communications director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 in Seattle, which represents Saar’s workers.
The union, notified Monday about the impending closure, may file an unfair labor practices complaint over the company’s alleged unwillingness to negotiate on a wage offer during contract negotiations that fell apart last week, Geiger said.
