Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Renovated Beall's sells well

Shoppers and Oldsmar officials have nothing but compliments for the refurbished store.

OLDSMAR - Beall's promised it would be ready for holiday shopping, and Fran Guida was not disappointed.

Guida, 75, does all her Christmas shopping at Beall's, across Curlew Road from her Gull Aire Village home.

She was the fourth one through the door when the department store reopened Nov. 7 after a renovation that tripled the size of the store.

After Kmart left the Woodlands Square Shopping Center earlier this year, Beall's renovated the 88,112-square-foot space and moved the department store in.

The 29,000-square-foot space near the AMC Woodlands Square 20 movie theater is now a Beall's Clearance Center, selling Beall's merchandise at 70 percent off.

"Beautiful, beautiful store," Guida said. "I'm so delighted. We all are, the whole neighborhood."

She said it's upscale and fresh with a lot of name brands. They still wrap your presents free. The small shopping baskets, about half the size of a grocery cart, are nice and so are the wide aisles.

"People with wheelchairs can zip right by," she said.

In the store last week, between walls topped in waves of yellow, gold and blue, shoppers were busy. Bernie Fisher, 76, of Clearwater was shopping in the expanded men's department with his wife, Mary, 80, and she was a little uneasy. "He's buying clothes for himself," she said to a friend. "Usually, I buy them."

A more reluctant shopper nearby, Francis Lyons, 75, of Clearwater popped his head out of a dressing room.

"I don't need them," he yelled to his wife, Catherine, 79. She shushed him and turned back toward a friend.

"Argue with you, argue with you, and then he's got nothing to wear," she said.

He was a baby when the stock market crashed in 1929, a child of the Great Depression. The New York City Police Department retiree popped his head out again. Don't want them, wouldn't wear them.

"It's costing me all kinds of money and I can't afford it," he said. "Where's the poor house?"

But the light khaki-colored trousers made it to the cash register.

"He'll wear them until they fall off him," his wife said later.

In the back of the store, Helen and Frank Furlong of East Lake Woodlands and Ontario were shopping amid the yuletide trimmings.

"I just love Christmas, with all the decorating," she said.

"It's too big," Frank Furlong complained about the new store. "I should have brought my book to read."

If he had, he could have sat on one of the chairs shaped like a silver lady's slipper in the junior's department. Maybe slip on the headphones and listen to Gloria Estefan or Ashanti.

Guida, always thinking, said she'd like to see a small coffee shop added - "Nothing heavy, just coffee and a doughnut," she said, "so you can sit down."

She also looks forward to the planned traffic signal at the main Curlew Road entrance to the shopping center. Officials now estimate it will be up in February.

Jim Simpson, Beall's Department Stores vice president of stores and real estate, said the customer response to the smaller store was a driving factor in the decision to open a big store in the Oldsmar market.

The multimillion-dollar renovation was completed by McIntyre Elwell and Strammer General Contractors of Sarasota.

Kevin Gartland, the chamber president and chief executive of the Oldsmar-Upper Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce, remembers when the rumor was that Beall's would close.

"It's encouraging to see reinvestment in Oldsmar," he said. "I think that's a very positive sign for Oldsmar and for the local economy as a whole."