After 25 years in the retail cookware business, Louise McCoy is closing her sweet little shop, McCoy’s Cookware.

She first opened the store in 1986 in Railroad Square, near where Hot Couture is located. In 1990, she moved to the current location at 2759 Fourth St., next to what is now Safeway but was then Petrini’s, a well-loved market still missed by many long-time residents. McCoy’s shares the space with Pearson & Co., which will take over the retail space sometime after the first week in February. Pearson & Co. is operated by Louise’s brother Mike McCoy and his wife Kendra McCoy.

Currently, everything in the store is 30 percent off and you can expect further reductions as the store’s final day approaches.

Louise is a great buyer and has for twenty-five years stayed up on trends and sought unique high-quality products for the kitchen and dining room that offered good value, too. And the store has long been the source for my favorite sponges, black ones that don’t show stains. She has sold hundreds of them since I began writing about them several years ago. They are the best sponges in the world.

For fifteen years, Louise, 72, worked on and off as a consultant to the Peace Corps; the opening of her store overlapped with her Peace Corps work.

Now, she says, she is ready to retire.

“I didn’t grow up with the Internet and I didn’t grow up with social media. These things–especially the Internet–have taken a real toll on the business this last year,” she says.

The closure of McCoy’s is, sadly, an example of what can happen when people shop on line to save a few dollars rather than support their neighbors’ businesses. For Louise, it comes at a time when she is ready to retire and so it is not as great a tragedy as the loss of, say, Traverso’s. But it can still serve as an object lesson: Do your research on line, spend your money in your community.

Louise, best of luck to you.

(Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)