Acting on a tip from the Browntown neighborhood newsletter, I emailed Harris Teeter PR about the possible closing of the Golden Gate store, and received confirmation from spokesperson Catherine Reuhl (full text after the jump). The store will close on or about July 26. All employees have been offered spots at other areas HT.

A blow to the Golden Gate shopping center, not to mention the social life of Irving Park.

The mega-Teeter at Elm and Pisgah Church is fine, but it lacks the old store's soul.

Who knows, maybe the empty center at Cone and Church will get a low cost tenant now.

Harris Teeter email 7/7/11:

After careful consideration and strategic market review, Harris Teeter has decided not to renew the lease for its Golden Gate shopping center store and will close the location on or around July 26, 2011. Our management team informed the associates employed at that location yesterday. Each associate was offered an opportunity for placement at one of Harris Teeter’s 17 other Triad and surrounding locations.

Harris Teeter designs, builds and maintains its stores in a manner to ensure complete customer satisfaction, and it is important for the company to always improve the shopping experience for its loyal shoppers. Harris Teeter's current store on Golden Gate Drive was built over 20 years ago and is a very small store that limits the variety and selection the company offers at its other locations. The company is not able to expand the footprint of this store and is closing its Golden Gate location to focus additional resources on other Harris Teeter stores in the area. Harris Teeter opened its Golden Gate location in 1988 and has nine stores in Greensboro, two in High Point and six in Winston-Salem. Many of these stores have recently undergone or are planned for remodels to improve your shopping experience.

It is Harris Teeter’s goal to constantly improve upon the services it offers its shoppers. We apologize for any inconvenience caused when we close our Golden Gate location but invite our shoppers to visit our other locations where they will continue to receive the highest levels of customer service and quality meat, seafood, produce and chef prepared foods available.

Comments

[michele]

"All it will end up being is another Lowe's Foods with all part time help and no one there who cares about the customers."

What? Lowes is my favorite. They're not good?

[Groceteria]

The current Libby Hill was originally a Hot Shoppes drive-in. It was apparently quite the hangout in the 1960s. I think it may have been a Honey's for a little while after that, but I'm not sure.

[bubba]

"The current Libby Hill was originally a Hot Shoppes drive-in."

.....which, of course, was modeled after the original HoJo's design.

Mr. Marriott copied Mr. Johnson's concept well, and took it a step further with the drive-in as part of the restaurant.

As a long time metro Washington DC resident, I fondly remember the Hot Shoppes, and their fast food offspring, Hot Shoppes Jr.

[Dan]

Quaker Village theater in the house. 27410 holla.

[chamsae]

I used to work at this location many years ago...I know some of the customers were the elderly people that lived across the street. Is that elderly home still there? If so where do they go now? Food lion? Many of them didn't have cars.

[Billy Jones]

chamsae, if you're speaking of the high rise old folks home on Church street, yes, it's still there. And yes, there is still a Food Lion in Golden Gate.