Portage MCC (Mennonite Central Commitee) has undergone many changes over the years, and another change has taken place very recently, with the addition of another store between the main thrift store and their Furniture Plus location. General Manager Kevin Hamm outlines their newest store and what is going into it.
"Last year, we celebrated 40 years in the community, and in August we celebrated 10 years in our Furniture Plus location in operation, and just now, we're celebrating the grand opening of our new location, which is called East 135," Hamm continues. "It's very curated. Over the years, we've realized that our volunteers and our staff are a wealth of information. So, a lot of times, people will say, 'Hey, that's really cool,' or 'That's something that is really sought-after right now, we should put it in this place.' And so we've often identified things that are a little more unique, a little more eclectic, you could say. So, we've had an e-commerce site now since the glory days of COVID and we've been selling items online at portagemcc.com, literally to people all over the world. And people have been shopping, and we've been shipping. We actually shipped a guitar all the way to Israel, an acoustic guitar. We've found a lot of interesting things, and so we're putting some of our most interesting things into East 135. It's a very small shop, we have about 2,000 items online right now, and about half of them are on display, and the rest are in the shop, and we just rotate the items regularly. So, there's always a very, very unique set of merchandise to shop from, both in store now and online."
Hamm also went into detail on some of the various items they have in the store.
"You can come in there, there's not a lot of, it's not a huge store or anything like that. It's just a neat little shop and we've got everything from anime and manga to rock LP's and vintage Star Wars toys, and and signed hockey jerseys, whatever you might find. It's a testament, really to the amazing generosity of the of the people of Portage la Prairie and area and just we have just some amazing donors. Some of the things that they entrust us with."
With the store officially opened now, Hamm emphasized that if you have donations to drop off, you're welcome to do that between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and on Saturday's from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.