‘Like family to this community’: A much-loved Raleigh business closes after 75 years
Business is booming inside the small, hot, red-brick dry cleaner business on New Bern Avenue, at the edge of downtown Raleigh.
But it’s an artificial kind of busy, says Honeycutt Cleaners owner Tim Honeycutt, who will close the store next week after nearly 75 years in business.
“We went from doing absolutely nothing at the height of the virus and then it started picking up around September, October,” Honeycutt, 60, said on Wednesday. “Then I had employees working two days a week, about 15 hours a week.”
When COVID-19 restrictions started to ease more recently, business bounced back a little more, to around 50% of its previous level, he said. But it stalled there.
“Now, word has gotten out that we’re leaving, so some of my regular people are coming,” Honeycutt said, his hands moving the whole time he talked — writing on labels, tagging shirts, recording orders in a notebook.
Those “regular people” are going to miss Honeycutt and his business, and they make sure to tell him that over and over with every load of shirts, suits, dresses, tablecloths and blue jeans they drop off.
Linda Cuffee entered the store on Wednesday proclaiming, “We’re gonna miss this man, we’re gonna miss! This! Man!”
Cuffee has been coming to the store since the 1970s, when she was a child tagging along with her father. When she stopped in to pick up a dress on Wednesday, she wasn’t sure if it would be her last time there.
“Honey, I done tried everything I could find,” she said. “I’ll probably go home and try (to find) some more before he leaves. I’m about to cry. I don’t want him to go!”
Ever since Honeycutt posted the sign in his store saying he would be closing on May 14 (that’s the last day they clean clothes, but he’ll be open for pickups until June 30), customers have been pouring in and telling him how much they’ll miss him, begging him to reconsider, and asking him what in the world will they do without him.
Cuffee runs the whole routine.
“The whole community’s gonna miss this man,” she says. “This place has a history, through this man. He’s a good man!”
Where will she go now?
“I don’t know! I don’t know where to go!”
“I’ll send ‘em to my friend down the street,” Honeycutt says, referencing another dry cleaner. “I hope they make it.”
“Well, Mr. Honeycutt, there ain’t nobody like you, because you’re like family to this community,” Cuffee tells him. “I was hoping one day I’d come in and he’d say, ‘Well, I changed my mind, guys!”
She pauses and looks at him, as if waiting for him to say it. All she gets is a chuckle and a shake of the head.
“Mr. Honeycutt, just think about it, just think about it,” she says.
“I’ve been thinking about it!” he answers.
“Everybody in the neighborhood says, ‘We’re gonna miss Mr. Honeycutt, we don’t want him to go,’ Cuffee says.
“He don’t really want to go either,” Honeycutt replies, laughing.
“What if I bring all my clothes and everybody’s clothes in here, and I go on the block with a picket sign and say ‘Bring your clothes to Mr. Honeycutt’?” she asks.
No, his mind is made up.
“I do think a lot of people thought I’d change my mind and I wouldn’t go,” Honeycutt said later. “But it’s way beyond that.
“If it was that simple I would (stay). I’m 60 years old, I don’t want to have to go get a job, I’d much rather stay here for my last working years, and then I could walk out and entertain the thought of stopping. But it just wasn’t meant to be.”
‘Little bitty places’ raise families
It hasn’t been an easy decision for Honeycutt. The business has been part of his family for longer than he’s been alive.
Honeycutt’s aunt and uncle, T. Manly and Daphne Honeycutt, opened the store at 605 New Bern Ave. in either 1946 or 1947 (he remembers his father always saying 1946, but his brother-in-law recently pointed out that Wake County property records show that the 3,011-square-foot structure was built in 1947). Honeycutt’s grandparents lived in a little house right beside the dry cleaner shop, in what’s now the store parking lot.
His aunt and uncle first ran it as a “pickup” business, meaning they’d go around to businesses — hotels, restaurants, fire departments — and pick up dirty laundry, then clean it and return it to customers.
The family eventually opened three other locations in Raleigh — on Western Boulevard, on Hillsborough Street and in Longview Shopping Center, just up the street from the original location, on New Bern Avenue. The other stores are all closed, with the Longview store lasting until 2012.
When his aunt and uncle started out, Honeycutt’s father, A. C. “Jack” Honeycutt, worked for them driving a truck, then took over the business when they retired in 1974.
Honeycutt started working for his father when he was in his early 20s, but it wasn’t exactly a childhood dream.
“I worked in tobacco to stay away from this place,” Honeycutt said. “It was hot and we weren’t famous for eating lunch, and I preferred to be with my friends in the tobacco field rather than work in this dry cleaning plant.”
On an average summer day, Honeycutt says the backroom at the shop hits 105 to 110 degrees.
“It’s not a cake job,” he says.
But as a young man, he realized it was a good opportunity for him. He learned the business from the ground up, trained by his father and “wonderful employees who have taught me everything I know.”
He ran the Longview location while his father ran the older store, and when his father was ready to retire in 1988, he bought the business from him and has run it ever since.
“We have managed to raise three families out of these little bitty places, so we can’t complain,” he says. “It could be a lot worse, for sure.”
‘You can’t get buried, you can’t get married’
Like his father and uncle before him, Honeycutt had hoped to retire from the business, but the COVID-19 pandemic spoiled those plans, so he’ll be looking for a job come July.
“If you can’t go to work regular, you can’t go to church, you can’t get buried, you can’t get married, you can’t go to the lodge, the shrine club, the optimist club, you can’t use tablecloths for catering events,” Honeycutt goes on and on, listing the reasons why people have stopped using dry cleaning services over the past year.
“My caterers, I feel sorry for them,” he says. “I don’t know what they’ll do. I’ve got tablecloths hanging everywhere back there. They can’t afford to pick ‘em up.”
The pandemic has delivered a particularly harsh blow to a business that was already struggling.
According to industry reports, the pandemic exacerbated issues plaguing dry cleaners for the past two decades. The declines started after Sept. 11, 2001, and got much worse after the housing market crash in 2008. When the economy suffers, people just don’t use dry cleaners as often.
Honeycutt said they were able to hold their own after the declines, but it was never the same. The business wasn’t as profitable, so there was never enough money to update the facility or the equipment.
“When the virus hit, you kind of knew where it was going,” said Honeycutt, who has just three employees now.
On top of the decrease in business, Honeycutt says suppliers are dropping off. He has one salesman left and no distributors. They’ve been recycling everything — plastic, hangers, you name it — because it’s been hard to get more. And what supplies he can get are far more expensive than before the pandemic.
“A little place like us, we make our living $15 at a time,” Honeycutt said, “so my door’s got to be swinging all day. I need 125-150 people a day coming through the door to have a chance at surviving.
“It’s better now. I’m up to 50, maybe 60%, but it’s not enough to make it.”
He worries about other dry cleaners, he says. He owns his property so he can just walk away. But many of the younger business owners “that are mortgaged, with nicer stores and nicer equipment, I don’t really know what they’re gonna do.”
Tried to hang on till retirement
Now instead of retirement, Honeycutt will be looking for a job to last him a few years until he hits retirement age.
“I’m going right straight back to work,” he said. “I was trying to hang on to retire, but it just didn’t work out.”
His requirements for his next job are modest: a paycheck, some vacation time and a lot less stress.
As he works, he stops to answer his cell phone, but it’s a short call.
“My sister is tracking me,” he says. “They’re all worried. They’re afraid I’ll get cold feet and back out because I’m sentimental.”
But he insists he’s not sentimental about it.
“The family will say, ‘Aw, it’s so sad.’ Well, you shoulda worked here 70 hours a week and it wouldn’t be that sad,” he laughs.
“My father, before he died ... he was my partner, my best friend, my beach buddy. He walked out that door about one of the last times he left, and he said, ‘Look, there’s nothing sentimental here, it’s a business ... When it’s time to go, you go.’”
And so he’ll go.
He credits his daughter with waking him up to the reality of the future of the business, and how he’s working harder and harder and continuing to struggle. “Are you just gonna let it kill you?” he says she asked him. No, he wants to be around for his wife, his two children and six grandkids.
But as hard as he tries, he can’t be completely unsentimental about it. You don’t own a beloved neighborhood business for almost 40 years without making friends.
Honeycutt admits he will miss those daily interactions with his longtime customers, and with cherished coworkers.
He references Linda Cuffee and another customer, David Prince, who stopped in the shop just after Cuffee on Wednesday, as the kinds of customers he’s known forever and will miss seeing and talking to.
He mentions Cornell Davis, a retired Raleigh firefighter who stopped in to pick up some shirts that same day.
“We’ve been friends for 30-some years,” Honeycutt said of Davis, who has been a customer there since 1973.
“I have about five guys who every Saturday, they come up here and they bring one or two shirts — they really don’t have to bring them, they just come up here to shoot the you-know-what with me and hang out and talk. And it’s a lot of guys like that. I’m just really gonna miss the camaraderie and the relationships that we’ve built.
“You start out as customers and then 10, 15 years later you become friends,” he said. “I’ll definitely miss that.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
