Wheatsville Co-op capped off a 45-year-run in Central Austin on Sunday when it shut down its Guadalupe location due to declining sales, rising rent and uncertainty about construction in the area.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been really difficult to remain a sustainable grocery store here as far as the economic pressure that a lot of businesses are facing,\u201d Wheatsville general manager Tanya Carney said.<\/p>\n
The store wound down operations not just by mourning, but also with celebration.<\/p>\n
Dozens of people gathered in the parking lot to watch Mangiasaurus, an 800-pound Godzilla-like sculpture, get pulled down from the roof of the store and hauled off to Wheatsville’s South Lamar location.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a good show for the community,\u201d Trevor Moore said as he watched the dino get loaded into a truckbed. \u201cThese things mean something.\u201d<\/p>\n
The monster first arrived at Wheatsville in 2007 when Mangia Pizza, which had a green dinosaur mascot, relocated and needed a place to put the sculpture.<\/p>\n
The co-op grocery offered its roof as a temporary home but when Mangia Pizza closed, the dinosaur remained and became a beloved landmark in Central Austin.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to reflect on what it means to have a giant dinosaur that was removed from a pizza place, placed on this grocery store, and now is being moved to their other location,\u201d Moore said. \u201cThat\u2019s symbolic of something.\u201d<\/p>\n
For its final day, Wheatsville Guadalupe served dinosaur-shaped cookies, marked all nonalcoholic items 30% off, and offered anybody who bought a T-shirt free coffee at their South Lamar location for a year.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust think about how much you spend on coffee every year,\u201d longtime employee Caleb Morton said as he checked out customers at the register.<\/p>\n
Wheatsville originally announced plans to close its Guadalupe location in 2024, so the store\u2019s closure wasn\u2019t a surprise to Morton or anybody else on staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe kind of got two years to process it,\u201d he said Sunday, \u201cso I\u2019ll probably cry today, but I\u2019ve had my time to process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Employees working at the Guadalupe location were offered jobs at Wheatsville South Lamar.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not like we’ve lost our job,\u201d Morton said, \u201cjust moving from our childhood home to another home.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wheatsville Co-op capped off a 45-year-run in Central Austin on Sunday when it shut down its Guadalupe location…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-481391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}