Farewell to Kitchen Port

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The move to a space on Zeeb Road across from Meijer raised some eyebrows, but company president Roberta Shrope says the new location was good for the store: “We were actually doing better out there. We knew from our mailing list that most of our customers lived on the west side of Ann Arbor.”

Shrope spent thirty years with the company, the last twenty-three as president. And while Kitchen Port was a corporation with forty-three shareholders, she’s always been the one with the most to lose if it ever went under. “I have been the one who has always guaranteed the line of credit, and I’ve done it with my house,” she says. So when she went over the books for December and discovered that sales were down 29 percent from the previous year, she had to make a hard choice: “I decided that this being my sixty-fifth year of age, I no longer wanted to put my house up.”

The shareholders tried to sell the business rather than just close up shop, and Shrope says they had a couple of interested parties—but when neither deal worked out, closing was the only option. “So it was a good forty-year run,” she says. “We paid all the vendors, we paid everybody, and just kind of slipped into the mist.”

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