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WAIKELE, Hawaii — It was the end of the road for a popular store in Waikele.
Ashley Furniture Home Store announced Saturday that it is going out of business.
It has been in Hawaii for four years.
The closing means employees are left with no jobs and customers with no furniture.
KITV’s Jodi Leong spoke with former Ashley Furniture employees, and said that Ashley’s managers notified more than a hundred employees Saturday morning that the company was closing its doors for good.
Customers awaiting the delivery of furniture they purchased slowly received the bad news.
A steady stream of disappointed customers stopped at Ashley Furniture Home Store Saturday night to find an untouched newspaper at the entrance and notices of the closure and a forced liquidation sale in two weeks.
Customers declined on-camera interviews, but they were upset when they came here to read the sign. One family said they spent $6,000 on living room and bedroom furniture.
Customers who called the store by phone heard this message: “Due to unfortunate economic circumstances, we are disappointed to inform you the Ashley Store is going out of business and close its stores on Nov. 10th.”
More than a hundred employees received word of the closure Saturday morning.
Brenda spent three and a half years as a sales rep at Ashley.
Now she is left without a job during the holiday season, and with a husband to care for.
“He’s out of work right now because he’s battling cancer, so it’s going to be kind of hard for us,” she said.
But Brenda and her colleagues seemed most concerned Saturday about what they feel is the dishonest way Ashley handled its customers just prior to the closure.
“When you told your managers on Monday that we were closing. You should have closed your doors that day and stopped taking money from people. But — greed,” Brenda said.
Instead, Brenda said they sold furniture all week.
So she took her customer files before leaving Ashley Saturday to notify customers of the closure and urge them to stop payment to the store and do what they can to get their money back.
“I have a few customers that I know didn’t get their merchandise, and they probably won’t get their merchandise,” Brenda said.
KITV’s calls to Ashley Furniture were not returned.
Meanwhile, customers who have not received furniture should call the store’s voicemail at 792-0011 or the number posted on the notices at the store’s entrance — 792-0054 — for further information.
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