People walking past the tiny vacant storefront might find it hard to imagine that just over a month ago, the aroma of cheddar-bacon-ranch popcorn flooded out from the store, one of the most unique in Evanston.
On February 24, Gary Poppins Popcorn closed its retail location on Sherman Avenue to become an exclusively wholesale corporation, leaving behind only a small yellow note pad page with a handwritten goodbye message.
“I moved because the community didn’t support my business,” said Gary Seltzer, the owner of the company. “What I thought was a good location turned out to be not what I thought it was.”
Poppins has been re-located to a warehouse in Franklin Park, where the company will focus on its wholesale business, selling to grocery stores and other shops. Seltzer said. The popcorn appears in 300 stores in the country, including 100 in the Chicago area.
A flier announcing the move and offering a discount for online orders was available in the store before its closing, but no sign was posted outside the shop until after it closed for good.
Evanston was the only retail location for the company. Seltzer said it held a special place in his heart because it was his hometown.
“I liked Evanston, I liked it a lot,” he said. “It was a nice little town that I actually grew up in. I wish I could’ve stayed but I would’ve been bankrupt.”
Seltzer said he is hoping to open a store on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago as well as in New York and other major markets, but he will never return to Evanston.
Located less than a block from campus, the store was a frequent stop for at least some students.
“I thought it was really good,” said Weinberg senior Evyn Williams, who said she went to the store once a month. “I didn’t know they moved, that’s too bad.”
The store was well-known to most students, said Alok Nadig, a Weinberg and Music freshman, who said he always noticed the “good smell” when walking past the store.
But while they may have known about it, few students actually visited the store, Seltzer said.
“I tried everything to generate business from Northwestern,” he said. “When I opened up the place, I thought there’d be lines. But nothing seemed to generate the kind of business I was looking for.”
The move marks the second Evanston specialty food store to close its doors in the past year. Cereality, the quirky gourmet cereal store located at 1622 Sherman Ave., left town last May. Its location remains vacant.
“Speciality foods is a very risky business,” said Jonathan Perman, the executive director of the Evanston Chamber of Commerce. “There aren’t that many businesses that really stay on for that long a time. Just the nature of it, businesses like that really open and close all the time.”
The small size of the old Poppins location means that the new tenant will probably be another niche-market store, said Marc Magill of Family Properties Inc., the accounts manager of the company that owns the building.
“It’s definitely good for specialty food stores,” Magill said. . “We’ve had another popcorn company ask about it, a cheese retailer and several others.”
Magill said that nine groups have displayed interest, and a new tenant will be chosen by the end of April. The new tenant will probably open in June or July, Magill said.
But student attitudes suggest the next tenant might be no more successful than Poppins.
“We’re probably going to get something else we don’t need, like another rare bookstore or something,” Williams said.
