DECATUR -- With the increase in housing came the need for more businesses in Decatur. Over the past three years, the city has enjoyed several new businesses offering a variety of services.
The face of business in Decatur changed in 2015 when Walmart bought the old Decatur General store which was previously owned by Lloyd Peterson. Shortly after Peterson's death in 2007, the store closed and remained unoccupied until Walmart acquired it in 2014. In January 2015, Neighborhood Market Express opened its doors, giving the residents of Decatur a place to shop for food and other essentials.
But all good things come to an end and, one year later, Walmart closed its store in Decatur (and Gentry), leaving residents to drive to Siloam Springs, Gravette or Bentonville if they wanted to shop in a Walmart. However, local businesses like Handy Mart, Farmers Coop and Carniceria Guanajuato Butcher Shop all picked up the slack and offered a wider variety of produce, dairy and other basic needs for the area residents.
Even when the Neighborhood Market was in operation, both Handy Mart and Carlos Perez' meat shop continued to flourish and continue to do so even during the current coronavirus shutdown.
The Walmart building sat empty for almost a year, but Decatur Mayor Bob Tharp contacted the group that operates the Dollar General chain and asked if it would like to open a Dollar General Express. And, in the summer of 2017, Decatur had a grocery/general store again and the business continues its success today.
Around the time of the Dollar General Express store, Decatur suddenly found itself without one of its convenience stores when EZ Mart suddenly closed the doors on its Decatur location in 2015. The building, like the old Dollar General building, remains unoccupied.
Shortly after the opening of the Neighborhood Market, the old Nichols Farm building was acquired by the Farmers Coop/Ace Hardware Group headquartered in Van Buren. After three months of renovation, the building was opened to the public in May of 2015 and remains a vibrant place to purchase feed for animals, paint, hardware and farm supplies.
In late 2016, Decatur underwent a period when no new businesses opened shop in this small town. Then a slow boom began in the summer of 2017 when the Decatur Pawn Shop opened its doors on the southwest corner of Main Street and Roller Avenue. Stanley Ellis, a former Decatur High School coach and his son Donald were looking for a suitable place to open a pawn and gunsmithing shop.
"We had to choose a place to open and Gravette already had a functioning pawn shop," Stanley Ellis recalled. "Decatur didn't and I was familiar with a lot of people here. So, knowing the people and liking the town, we decided to park here."
Decatur Pawn is more than a place to pawn items for extra cash; it is a fully licensed gun sales and service facility.
"We offer full-service gunsmithing, plus we also pawn products, primarily tools and guns is what we get the most of," the elder Ellis said. "We have sporting goods, fishing poles, but our guns are our primary business. We sell new and used guns."
In spite of the economic crises that face most small business owners around the world, Stanley Ellis finds that his business is booming during the pandemic.
"You have people worrying about the future and wanting to buy things to defend themselves," Ellis said. "We have been doing a lot of sales. In fact, we have sold out of our entire inventory twice now. The problem we face is that a lot of our vendors are in states that aren't open and we can't get items. Prices are going up and we are having difficulty replacing stock, which is standard for most gun stores."
Around the same time, Luck Sood expanded his business into the building on the southeast corner of Main and Roller and the old Decatur State Bank. He opened a recreation room called "Junction 59," a place where teens and adults could come and play games and watch sports on a big-screen television. In addition, he offered a vape shop and a U-Haul truck and trailer rental. Unfortunately, over the last few years, the business slowdown forced Sood to curtail some of the Junction 59 operations.
However, in late 2019, Decatur has seen a resurgence of new business openings, the first of which was the Ramirez Auto and Bus Sales lot at 476 South Main Street and bus restoration shop on Hill Avenue.
Raul and Yesenia Sivas Ramirez, along with their son Christian, opened the doors in October of 2019. They go to bus auctions around the state and buy retired school buses and transport them back to the Hill Street facility where each bus undergoes an extensive mechanical makeover, as well as cleaning and repainting before going on sale at their Main Street lot and via the internet. They also offer in-house financing on both cars and buses.
"There is a big market for used buses. I sell to schools, churches and country places," Raul Ramirez said. "There are a bunch of people that have different uses for a bus. There is a big market for used buses."
Raul Ramirez has been around buses since a very early age when his father drove and repaired buses in Mexico. At 14, he was driving buses in Mexico.
When he came to Decatur several years ago, he decided to open his own shop and sales facility. He found there was a market for refurbished buses, not just in the United States but also in Mexico. Almost 50 percent of his sales are generated on the international market, while the other 50 percent comes from sales nationwide.
Over the last few months with the covid-19 pandemic, Ramirez had to switch from attending auctions to purchasing units online and then selling them online as well. Business continues to grow for the Ramirez Used Cars and Bus Sales.
Lee's Auto Repair shop also opened its doors early last year in the old Decatur Flea Market building next to the depot in downtown Decatur. Across the street, in the old TNT building next to the Simmons store, Northwest Arkansas Auto Sales is in the process of remodeling the old facility. An opening date is unknown as of press time.
Of course, the TNT complex on the south end of Decatur continues to offer several services to area residents including the TNT Express convenience and take-out food store, NAPA Auto Parts, TNT Trailer Sales, TNT Tire and TNT Auto and Truck repair shop. Together, all of these facilities will continue to offer consumers the same great service that they have in the past several years.
With the prospect of more people moving to Decatur, a host of new businesses will likely soon follow, offering area residents a wide variety of different products and services.
General News on 05/20/2020