Popular Joann Fabric leaving Cranberry Mall in May

Aug 01, 2023

The Cranberry Mall is suffering another blow as anchor store Joann Fabric has announced it is closing its doors at the mall in May.

May 14 is the tentative last day for the store to stay open, and liquidation sales will start after March 26, store manager Kiersten Dunn said Thursday afternoon.

"Until March 26, we’ll just have regular Joann sales," Dunn said, adding that they will also start shipping out some of their merchandise to other nearby Joanns during that time.

The decision to close the mall outlet was made by Joann's corporate headquarters on Feb. 10, and it came suddenly, Dunn said.

"It wasn't planned," she said. She noted that the Joann headquarters reviews its stores every November, and at its last review in November 2022, the Joann's at the Cranberry Mall was "deemed profitable."

"I have an employee who has worked here for 25 years, and they said it was the best winter they’ve ever seen here," Dunn said.

While she said there are things she doesn't know or isn't permitted to discuss, she said she did know the closure is "because of the mall."

In addition, the store has experienced some issues with roof leaks over the past year, which damaged some of the merchandise in the store.

"Almost a year ago, a whole panel collapsed from saturation and took out a rack of patterns," Dunn said of the ceiling panels. "We had a whole trail of missing panels for at least a few months. The customers could see that--it was very much out in the open."

She added that there was dripping onto an electrical box in the store, and "we had some splashback on our sewing machines."

That leak has since been fixed, she said.

As for whether Joann would look for an alternate location in the area, Dunn said she had been told that corporate headquarters were "looking into all options," but that "right now, it's looking like we’d have to triple our inventory to relocate in the area," which wouldn't be a feasible business model for the area.

She thought that might have to do with the size of available spaces to rent.

Once the Cranberry Mall Joann Fabrics is gone, customers will have to travel roughly 50 miles to reach any of the three nearest Joann outlets — which are in Meadville, Butler, and Dubois.

"We’re all sad to go," Dunn said, adding that Joann's has been a great community resource, frequently serving the Amish, local churches who make blankets for donations, and even the Barrow-Civic Theatre.

Customer Susie Blair, who lives two miles away from the mall and was having a conversation with another customer in the store on Thursday afternoon, said "we’re just bemoaning the fact that there's not another store here. You have to go so far," she said.

To go to Butler or Meadville "becomes a journey," she said. "You can't say, ‘I’m just running over to the mall’."

Jeff Clark, a manager at the Cranberry Mall, told the newspaper Thursday that the mall management team had no comments.

Telephone calls were made by the newspaper Thursday afternoon to the real estate manager for the Joann Fabrics corporation and to California-based Oakwood Management Group, which owns the mall, but the calls weren't returned as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

Oakwood remains in the process of finalizing the mall's sale to Florida-based Dundas Real Estate.

HELEN FIELDING, reporter for The Derrick and The News-Herald, can be reached at [email protected] or 814-677-8374.

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