Haynes Furniture Is Gone After 128 Years. The Take.

Haynes Furniture and The Dump are closing permanently — all of them — ending a 128-year family retail run that started on Grace Street in Richmond and Main Street in Norfolk. Going-out-of-business sales began October 8 at 10am, run by liquidation firm SB360, with discounts of 40 to 80 percent and deeper cuts coming.

Six stores are left: two Dump locations (Norfolk and Richmond) and four Haynes (Virginia Beach, Newport News, two in Richmond). The flagship on Virginia Beach Boulevard — the one with the headquarters above it — goes dark with the rest.

E.J. Strelitz, the executive chairman, called it "a bittersweet ending, filled with gratitude for four generations of customers and employees." His grandparents, Ellis and Minnie, bought the little Norfolk store around 1930 with a goal of being "good people to deal with." Four generations later, that's still the whole business plan, and it's the reason this one stings.

The take

Here's what's actually closing: not a furniture store, but one of the last family-owned retail institutions in the region — the kind where the chairman knew the showroom staff by name and said so out loud, on the record, on the way out. The 757 didn't lose a place to buy a couch. It lost a place that treated selling you a couch like a relationship.

The liquidation logic is impeccable and the loss is real at the same time. That's the whole story of American retail in one sentence. Go walk the Virginia Beach Boulevard flagship before it's empty — not for the 60-percent-off sectional, though get the sectional too — but to see what 128 years of "good people to deal with" looked like in person.