Marden’s to occupy Ellsworth Ames site

ELLSWORTH – A discount retailer with 10 stores in Maine has announced plans to open a store on High Street, giving area shoppers a new place to buy furniture, carpeting and other odd-lot items.

For some people, the important thing about Marden’s Surplus & Salvage is not so much the merchandise it will offer but that it will fill the 65,000-square-foot retail space formerly occupied by an Ames retail store.

The vacant building is part of Maine Coast Mall and has sat empty since Ames Department Stores Inc., which had 327 stores primarily in the northeast United States, went out of business and closed its stores last fall.

Micki Sumpter, executive director of the Ellsworth Area Chamber of Commerce, said Friday that Marden’s presence will be a boon to the High Street mall and to Ellsworth.

“I think Marden’s is a great, community-minded business,” Sumpter said. “We’re pleased for the other small businesses up there” in the mall.

Sumpter said that with Ames closing its doors just before last year’s important Christmas shopping season, and with the recent move of a Movie Gallery video rental store from the mall to a new location north on High Street, the smaller tenants in the mall have not been attracting so many customers.

“At times, they were suffering terribly,” Sumpter said.

Richard Kelso, co-director of Coastal Acadia Development Corp. in Ellsworth, said that many landlords around Maine have had a difficult time filling spaces formerly occupied by Ames and Service Merchandise, which also retreated from big-box buildings around the region.

“It’s great,” Kelso said of the new Marden’s. “I think they’ll do well there.”

He said many big national retailers prefer stores larger than the sizes used by Ames and Service Merchandise and find it easier to build buildings from scratch than to expand or retrofit old ones.

Dan McAllian, who will manage the Ellsworth branch for Marden’s, said Thursday that the company plans to open the store in September. He said Marden’s plans to hire 80 to 100 part-time and full-time employees to work in Ellsworth.

“We made the decision to try [to secure the former Ames space] three or four months ago,” McAllian said.

The owner of the mall, Harold MacQuinn Inc., and Marden’s agreed on a lease for the space just recently, he said.

McAllian said Marden’s hopes to modify the building interior, which includes warehouse and office space, to give the store more room for retail sales.

Besides offering full-service carpet and furniture sales, McAllian said, Marden’s sells almost anything else it can get from surplus and salvage sales around the country.

“If we don’t have to feed it, we buy it,” he said.

Marden’s has 10 other locations in Maine, according to McAllian: two each in Waterville and Calais and one each in Brewer, Lewiston, Lincoln, Portland, Presque Isle, and Sanford.

Another Marden’s is expected to open in Houlton in the coming months, also in a space formerly occupied by Ames, according to McAllian.