Council Re|Sale manager Rochelle Adler shows the women’s clothing section of the thrift store.
By: Mike Koury | Woodward Talk | Published August 27, 2024
BERKLEY — A Berkley resale business will be expanding while another is looking to move to a bigger location across the street.
Within the next couple of months, Council Re|Sale, 3297 W. 12 Mile Road, will be expanding its business into the neighboring space currently occupied by Time Travelers comic book and games shop.
Re|Sale, run by the National Council of Jewish Women, Michigan, currently has 6,600 square feet and, with the expansion, will add another 4,400 once it knocks down the wall between the two buildings.
“We get an enormous amount of donations into the store,” NCJW|MI President Amy Zeskind said. “Women’s (clothing), men’s, housewares, jewelry, all sorts of stuff into the store and we don’t have a great place to store all the inventory that we get. And that also means that we have all these great products that we can’t put out on the floor, because we don’t have the floor space to meet the demands of what we bring in.”
The expansion will allow Re|Sale full access to the site’s basement, which it did not have before, for storage use. Executive Director Susan Gertner said the store has to rent a storage unit to store its excess products.
“It’s like expensive real estate having some of our home decor just sitting on shelves because there’s no space for it,” she said. “Once we expand, we’re going to have a large home decor department, and when we get the donations, they’ll go straight onto the floor rather than having to sit until we make room.”
For Time Travelers, they are looking to move across the street into a unit at 3116 W. 12 Mile Road, Suite A. The space also will be a square-footage upgrade for the long-running comic shop.
“We would be sharing a space with The Lunch Cafe. So when you look at the building, it doesn’t look like it’s all that big, but once you get in there, it opens up quite a bit. So it’s about double the size of the other store,” said owner Michael Morgan.
“When we saw the space, we liked it and we had been looking to get a warehouse, and the basement on this new space is pretty decent,” he continued.
Time Travelers had hoped to move into its new site in May, and while the new location has its sign up, Morgan stated that there’s been some hiccups with this process.
“There is some stuff that needs to be finished in the building that we’re waiting to be finished,” he said. “It’s taken, honestly, a whole lot longer than expected and, unfortunately, that has caused a little bit of a dispute between us and the landlord.”
The legal issue with the landlord, which Morgan declined to comment more on, currently is in the 44th District Court.
Before the expansion and move, Re|Sale did look at other areas to possibly move its business, but the shop is happy it’ll be able to keep its home in Berkley.
“We did not want to leave Berkley,” Gertner said. “It’s a perfect location for people coming from Detroit or Southfield or West Bloomfield. So it’s been a good, good community for us. And when we looked, we never found what we were looking for. … This just works for us.”