City Mission to close Monongahela Thrift Store
MONONGAHELA – Customers of the City Mission Thrift Store were saddened by the news Tuesday that the shop at 211 W. Main St. in Monongahela will close in two weeks.
“It’s sad,” said Claudine Norelli of Rostraver. “It’s very sad. I don’t know why they’re closing, and these poor people are losing their jobs.”
Terra Phillips of Monongahela expressed a similar sentiment as she entered the store, slated for a March 14 closing.
“This place has been here for a while,” she said. “I come in here a lot. I actually have a couple of friends who work here, so it’s kind of disappointing that they’re going to lose their jobs.”
Melissa Marion, City Mission’s director of development, explained that after a lengthy review it was determined that it would be cost-effective to close the store.
“The main purpose of each of our thrift stores is to provide proceeds and revenue that support our mission, serving homeless individuals and the vulnerable community members,” she said. “Any time a store isn’t performing at a level that we would like to do or isn’t providing the revenue or the proceeds to help us carry out our mission, we have to evaluate whether to continue operating it or not. Monongahela just hasn’t been performing financially like we would hope. It hasn’t been for a very long time. We had to make the very difficult decision to close Monongahela.”
The West Main Street thrift store has been in business since July 2021. Proceeds from sales go toward keeping City Mission’s doors open and allow it to aid in providing meals, shelter, medical care and career training to those in need. Many donations go to the City Mission’s warehouse to provide residents the opportunity to learn job skills.
The move comes on the heels of the closing of the Rostraver Township store in November. After the Monongahela store closes, five locations will remain – Washington, Canonsburg, North Strabane, Uniontown and Waynesburg.
“They closed Rostraver, now this,” said Sue Trail of Bunola. “I’m really upset because I thought this mission was here to help people.”
Marion said opportunities remain for people to not only shop, but also to continue donating merchandise for the stores to sell.
“A lot of people see the thrift stores as an opportunity to shop,” she said. “It starts at the beginning with our donations. In order for our thrift stores to be viable and successful, it starts with the number of donations that we get and the quality of donations that we get. Our stores are always looking for your gently used items that we accept. We have pickup, so our City Mission thrift trucks will come to your house and pick up large furniture and those types of things. We’ll even pick up donations if it’s a certain number of bags.”
As for the merchandise at the Monongahela store, Marion said there may be some sales depending on the quality of inventory that remains. Anything left will be dispersed to the remaining stores.
Marion said the City Mission has given the five employees of the store the opportunity to transfer to another location.
“We love the thrift community,” Marion said. “It’s sort of our outreach to the community. We have our main campus in Washington, but it’s always nice to be in other areas, reminding folks about what it is we do and how their shopping and donating supports that. We want to be able to still have that presence; it just has to make sense for us financially to be able to operate and to continue to do that.”