Harbor Freight Tools to open in area

The national chain Harbor Freight Tools is renovating a portion of the old Ashley Furniture space in Northside Shopping Center with its first Gainesville location for a likely late fall opening.

The center is at N. Main Street and 23rd Avenue, anchored by a Winn-Dixie and a Big Lots.

The Camarillo, Calif.-based Harbor Freight made its name in discount catalog sales and has opened 325 stores in 44 states.

Property broker Bruce Rider of Bosshardt Realty said, "There's been a ton of folks traveling to Ocala for years" to the Harbor Freight store. "They are very cost-effective."

Steven Leander, general contractor on the renovation, said the stores have a unique design with an exposed heating and air system instead of drop ceilings.

District manager Ron White said he would visit next week to monitor progress before setting a tentative opening date.

Rider said the renovations should be completed by the end of the month, with a possible opening in late November.

The store will occupy 12,000 square feet of the 50,000-square-foot Ashley space. Rider said he is in talks with a company he wouldn't identify that might fill the remaining space.

PROGIFTS SOLD: When John and Melinda Farrell's five companies began to cut into their family time, they decided to lighten their load by selling ProGifts Inc., a promotional products company.

"We always vowed that our daughters would never pay the price of our owning our own companies," Melinda Farrell said.

New owner Karen Kneppar has a background in print advertising and plans to continue to grow the 10-year-old business.

Otherwise, not much else has changed. Melinda Farrell remains on the staff of nine as a sales rep at a new 1,300-square-foot facility off Fort Clarke Boulevard.

The Farrells started the business out of a home office with a focus on promotional products and embroidered clothes for PGA Seniors and LPGA golf events. They grew into corporate product promotions with hundreds of clients across the nation, gaining a local toehold by purchasing TWT Advertising and US Promo.

Their other companies include Dacasso Limited, a leather desk set manufacturer in Gainesville; The Elegant Office, a Web-based desk and office items retailer; Inboit Solutions, a graphics company in India; and an umbrella company over all of them.

NEW GATEWAY BANK ALSO IN NETWORK: Add The Gateway Bank of Central Florida to the list of local banks offering insurance on deposits of up to $50 million through the Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service.

A customer can open one CDARS account of up to $50 million through the bank and the network splits it up into amounts covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in separate member banks. Federal bailout legislation temporarily raised deposit insurance from $100,000 per individual account to $250,000.

Florida Capital Bank and Alarion Bank also offer CDARS accounts.

The Gateway has been operating out of a temporary Gainesville office in Metro Corp. office park at 4110 NW 37th Place since April while it builds its own building next door, expected to open in about a year, according to Laude Arnaldi, senior vice president of commercial lending.

Gateway is also building a bank at Town Center Crossing in front of Hitchcock's grocery store in Alachua that will open within 90 days, giving the Daytona Beach-based bank nine branches.

LAUNDRY BUSINESS SLOWED: The economy is even taking a toll on the laundry business, according to Steve Walker, owner of Gatorland Laundromat in the aforementioned Northside Shopping Center.

The summer was slower than normal, he said, but it's not that people are washing their clothes less often, although that is sometimes the case. Instead, they have been doing their laundry at relatives' or friends' homes, or hanging their clothes on a line outside.

Customers are starting to come back, however, as the relatives and friends see how much their utility bills go up, or line-drying efforts keep getting foiled by afternoon rain showers, Walker said.

Some customers who can afford washers and dryers prefer the laundry service to save on their own utility bills and because of the time saved by the commercial machines, he said.

Anthony Clark can be reached at anthony.clark@gvillesun.com or 352-374-5094.