Hillsdale, Michigan (Store #580)

[TheFugitive]

I was here for just under a year before a series of unforeseen circumstances resulted
in my hasty transfer to Imlay City.   It was located in a shopping plaza on Will Carleton Road
(Michigan Route 99) as it headed towards the adjoining community of Jonesville.  It shared
the plaza with a Kroger's, and there was a McDonalds located in the parking lot.

(Will Carleton was a Hillsdale native who gained fame as a poet and a sportswriter.  He is
best remembered for a poem called Over the Hill to the Poor House, which became widely
known during the Depression)

The building was basically a dump.  It was an old G.C. Murphy Mart store, one of just a couple
located in Michigan.  The roof had a huge number of leaks.  Buckets and trash cans could be
found in most of the aisles catching drips.  We would call out a roofing crew from Toledo to work
on it, and when they were done all of the leaks would have moved to new locations.  The electrical
systems were antiquated.  There was no central control panel, and when you closed up for the night
you would have to run around the building and shut off the lights from four separate switch panels.

There was a big empty room off to the side of our HBA department that had formerly been a
restaurant.  This was used as a stockroom where a massive amount of merchandise was stored.
Mostly old HBA and hardware pegged goods from the GC Murphy days which were under Ames
dump SKU's.  (this was about 2 years after Ames had acquired Murphy's).  This allowed the manager
to play fast and loose at inventory time as he was able to assign basically any value he wanted to
the dump SKU'd merchandise.   Frankly I was always a bit queasy about this, and was not unhappy
to leave and go to a store where everything had an Ames SKU and was booked in inventory.

Hillsdale was, quite literally, 35 miles from anywhere.  This is no doubt why Ames liked the location.  It was a college town and if you were a student looking for pillowcases, soap, knock-down furniture, etc.  we were really your only local option.  There was a mall in Adrian, 35 miles to the east, a Meijers in Jackson, same distance to the north, or another Ames down in Bryan, Ohio, about that far south.  The store basically was toast the day Walmart announced that they were going into neighboring Jonesville.

The people at this store were all very nice (save for one assistant manager whom I had chronicled earlier). The town was absolutely beautiful.  My apartment was in a big, old elegant mansion that resembled the White House and which had been cut into five apartments.  Given the remote location I could never figure out just why the town was founded, and from where they earned their money to build houses like that.

Today it appears that Kroger has taken over that entire plaza.