Cherry Street Dollar to close in May

After less than a year of operation, Vermillion’s Cherry Street Dollar Plus store will be closing due to low sales volume and the low-markup nature of the dollar store business.

Dennis Whipple, who co-owns the store along with USD student Sarah Stewart, said that the store’s revenue was “not paying any of the bills” since its July 27 opening this past summer.

“We were losing money every month,” Whipple said, with the exception of December, which “was a break-even month.”

The problem, Whipple said, was that $1 items tend to not bring in a lot of revenue, and customers were few and far between.

There is “not a lot of markup with dollar stuff,” Whipple said. He attributed the lack of customers to the fact that consumers’ shopping habits are difficult to break, and Vermillion residents were already accustomed to shopping elsewhere in town.

When the store shuts down at the end of May, some of the remaining merchandise will be moved to Discount Grocery in Yankton, where they will rent shelf space. Doing this is more economical than to offer steep clearance discounts on the remaining inventory, Whipple said.

When Whipple and Stewart first opened the store this past summer, the lack of a dollar store in Vermillion seemed like a market with an opening, considering the large number of college students in the community, he said.

A number of people in town suggested the idea of a dollar store to Whipple, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“We thought we’d probably make a go of it,” Whipple said.

For the time being, Cherry Street Dollar employs three people besides Whipple and Stewart. Two of them are USD students and one is a Vermillion High School student, Whipple said. The three share a total of 25 working hours per week.

For Whipple, who once owned Vermillion’s Dairy Queen, opening the dollar store was a “semi-retirement thing” to keep him occupied.

All things considered, “it is what it is,” Whipple said.