THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 9, 1994 TAG: 9411090375
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
When the Groom's Corner stores went bankrupt, Debbie Supper lost the shirt off her back. Make that: four shirts, a dress and a pair of pants.
Supper didn't own a Groom's Corner store, nor was she an investor in the company. She didn't even work there. Her only mistake: dropping off her dry cleaning at the wrong time.
``I'm one of the so-called victims of the bankruptcy,'' Supper says. ``They have my laundry.''
Supper tells the story of her vain attempts to retrieve $250 worth of clothes as an example of how an average customer is just as likely to lose out in a bankruptcy as a creditor.
Sure, Supper's clothing is small shakes compared to the $65,000 Virginia Formals Inc. - Groom's Corner's owner - owes the IRS, the $12,000 it owes the city of Norfolk or the $2,400 it owes Beach Ford. But the hassles are the same.
Supper's two-month search for her clothes began in September, when she went to pick up her laundry at Groom's Corner's Miller Store Road dry cleaning operation. Runnymede Corp., the company that was leasing the store to the Groom's Corner, hadn't been paid its rent and decided to close the store.
It was a frantic scene. Groom's Corner employees were rushing in and out with tuxedos, trying to salvage the store's more valuable merchandise.
``I was there the day the officers came to lock up the store,'' Supper says, as if marking a historic event.
That's when Supper's search got ``really bizarre.'' Runnymede Corp.'s Dennis Napier said he opened up the Miller Store Road store twice so people with dry cleaning could look through piles of clothes to try to find their laundry.
``We were not left any records or a list or anything,'' Napier said.``It's a mess.''
Thirty or 40 people showed up both times. Napier said he'd be willing to open the store again, but there's not much left. ``All we have is a few dress shirts left.''
Supper recovered one of her husband's five dress shirts. The rest of her dry cleaning, she thinks, was for some reason moved to the Groom's Corner's Kemps River Crossing store.
There, she found a legal roadblock. Groom's Corner was subleasing its store from a previous tenant. The previous tenant has continued to pay its rent, so Kemps River's management cannot open up the doors for people to look for their clothes.
The Blind Factory took over the former Groom's Corner store at Fairfield Shopping Center and let people sort through the clothes left behind. Supper's dry cleaning wasn't there.
``No one would ever think by taking your clothes to a dry cleaner that they're going to go bankrupt and you'll lose all your clothes,'' Supper says, no quite ready to give up her search. ``Those clothes have to be somewhere.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Jim Walker, Staff
Debbie Supper...
by CNB