By MARK HAYWARD
Manchester – Dunn Furniture Showroom, the company that opened 50 years ago as a furniture factory and eventually


became one of the city’s best known furniture retailers, has started a pre-going-out-of-business sale yesterday and should be closed by year’s end, its owner said yesterday.

The company remains profitable but is struggling under changes in the market, including deflation caused by furniture imports, said owner Mark Dunn.

“I’ve been doing it for 30 years. It’s enough. I want to do something else,” Dunn said.

Located at the corner of Canal and Hollis streets, Dunn Furniture sent out 12,000 notices to customers advising them of the sale and offering additional discounts from sale prices. Most pieces are one-third to one-half off the regular retail price, Dunn said.

About 25 full- and part-time people work at Dunn and will lose their job once the store closes.

“I have a mortgage and teenagers. What do I do now?” said Emelie Cooper, a saleswoman. Cooper said she started just a week ago at Dunn, after leaving a job at Rite Aid in order to try something else.

A lot of the customers she talked to yesterday are sad, she said.

“This (Dunn) had been around for 50 years. Their grandfather bought furniture here, and they bought furniture here. A lot are sad,” she said.

Dunn’s father, Francis Dunn, started the company on Grove Street 50 years ago, manufacturing sofa beds and pine furniture. A factory store opened in 1978, and Dunn started shifting to sales as furniture production moved to the Carolinas.

The company specializes in mid-priced product and is geared toward special orders. But Dunn said the business is changing. Customers no longer want to wait six to eight weeks for a special-order shipment, he said. And, as nearly all manufacturers have shifted production to China, special orders have become expensive.

“You can’t order one bedroom set from China. You have to order a whole container,” he said.

Meanwhile, prices have fallen because of overseas production, meaning retailers have to sell more product to generate the same amount of income.

The company owns the historic, two-story mill building and leases space to Tiny Totland and Milton’s Millyard Grill.