Do You Remember Mulberry Street?

In 2003, Coinopwarehouse moved to Mulberry Street in Hagerstown, MD. That was the first time the business had been based outside of Virginia. It was a long, two-story, cinderblock building with a concrete floor on the first floor and a wood floor on the second level. It had about sixteen thousand square feet of space, when the outbuildings were included. There was a small show-room that was carpeted and heated, and a second smaller room with a concrete floor and gray cinderblock walls that functioned as a shipping room. That shipping room had no window, so was lit only by fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. That environment would challenge the cheeriest of temperaments! On the positive side, the building had 3 loading docks, which was really helpful when we had to load sea containers or unload the pickup truck.
 
When the business first moved to Mulberry Street, Lloyd had very little help. Ben was still in college, Amanda was still in high school, and I was still working as an elementary school teacher. Lloyd had no employees then. The building had no nearby commercial neighbors, so unless Lloyd was out picking, he was usually there alone.

Saturdays were the exception. Each Saturday morning we drove up to the warehouse to meet customers. Peter Hirschberg was helping Lloyd load up customer vehicles with their new purchases then. Peter was creating his beloved Luna City Arcade, which you can still see photos of online, and he loved the chance to see the games and to take them home to restore.

Here is an example from  http://lunacityarcade.com/photos.htm


Here is the arcade when it was still in Peter's basement, before he constructed a building for it outside his house. This photo is from an interview that can be found on the Luna City Arcade website.

Peter was working at AOL full time then, but is now working at what he loves best, game design, at EA games.

We loved Peter! He was always so cheerful and worked so hard, even when he was freezing! Unless we were in the showroom or shipping room, the building was always freezing in the winter, and well into the Spring, because those concrete floors held onto the cold. Sometimes it was colder in the building than outside. Lloyd used a heater that always reminded me of a jet engine, to take the chill off a little bit in the area that they were loading in.

While Peter and Lloyd helped the customers, I stayed in the shipping room to package parts orders or do Ebay listings. The operation was so primitive then. We were using recycled boxes for shipments and crumpled newspapers for packaging material. Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to find a box that a part would fit in, and my hands would be black from newsprint when I was done with packaging. I had to hand write each shipping label and each customs form for overseas shipments and then load the truck with boxes to drive to the post office for shipment. There would be boxes in my arms and on the floor that I would push along with my feet.

I told Lloyd that it was too time consuming to search the warehouse for suitable boxes for each shipment, and we acquired a collection of boxes from the post office for many different shapes and sizes. We bought bags of packaging peanuts and rolls of bubble wrap to improve the quality and speed of our packaging. Now I could get more done in less time and without black hands! If only Lloyd, and Ben (when he came home for a weekend) would quit stealing my scissors and tape and leaving them all around the warehouse. Every week I would come to my shipping table and ask, "Where are my scissors and tape dispenser?" and the search would begin for them. Sometimes it was 30 minutes before they were found! It was big place.

Lunchtime would come, and I would drive to KFC or Roy Rogers to pick up lunch for the three of us, and then coax Peter and Lloyd into taking a warm-up break in the shipping room to eat something.

Although Coinopwarehouse is now an Ebay Powerseller, back then we were just learning how to create an Ebay auction. I had a digital camera that we actually needed to connect to the computer with a cord to upload a photo to the auction. Lloyd always set the goal of 100 listings in a day, but it took so long to create one listing then, that we never managed more than 20. We gradually acquired better cameras, with memory cards, and made an arrangement with UPS to pick up packages for shipments. I really loved being able to print shipping labels on our computer from a database of buyers and get the packages picked up at our warehouse. We still used the post office for some shipments, and now they pick up at our warehouse also. No more trips to the post office, except to check our P.O Box.

We sold a lot of circuit boards for video games when we were on Mulberry Street. Green and prickly, they looked mostly the same to me, except for variations in size. So, when Lloyd wanted to speed through his Ebay listings and skip the step of attaching an identifiying tag to the board, it was daunting to sort through all of the items to find the one that needed shipping. "Please use the tags!," I would beg him. "I can't tell the boards apart!". He got on board with the tags, so shipments go much more smoothly these days, although I no longer do them.

After 3 years, our Mulberry Street warehouse was sold. Real estate values had skyrocketed and the building had become too valuable to hold on to for a business our size. We sold it, just before the market turned down, and it helped to put Lloyd's kids through college and to fund some home improvements.  He bought an old peanut warehouse just South of Richmond, Virginia to use  as storage for equipment and he worked from home for 6 months. Petersburg is another story.....

If you have photos of your visits to Mulberry Street, I would love to see them and upload them here! Send them on to me, please!