POULSBO — For 60 years Jim Whyte learned the ins and outs of the retail trade.
At age 11, he went to work in a shoe shop on weekends. Then he made it in at Alexander’s Menswear.
“And then the Woolworth’s manager stole me,” Whyte says. “He liked the way I washed windows.”
So at just 15, Whyte went to work as a cleanup boy for the F.W. Woolworth Co., one of the country’s original five-and-dime stores. Whyte would spend decades managing locations for the company throughout Southern California after a four-year Air Force stint.
More than half a century after his first foray into variety selling, Whyte is now taking an out route, closing his own 20-year Poulsbo discount store this month.
Pared to remaining odds and ends as it may be, Whyte’s Six Star Factory Outlet is still just what reads on the glass doors leading into it: “Much more than a dollar store.”
There are wind chimes. Near a set of wall hangings sits a row of porcelain sailboats; beneath an array of necklaces are Mad Scientist slime jars. Tall racks of magnets and sunglasses stand like sentries — all within the first few yards of Six Star’s entrance.
For 20 years in the Poulsbo Village Whyte has peddled wares of various sorts and fads, like 90’s bestseller Pogs, which Six Star ordered by the thousands.
“They’d be psychedelic, they’d be anything you can think of,” Whyte recalled of the colorful, themed discs used to play the game. “After school the kids would come in and the place would just be flooded.”
On Tuesday morning, the shop — normally festooned in novelties and thingamajigs — is vacuous, quiet, much of its medley already gone.
“People are sad, a lot of people have grown up in our store,” Whyte says. “They started coming in when they were little kids and now they’re adults.”
But it’s not on the closing he wants to focus. Briefly he notes the 2006 opening of Poulsbo’s Wal-Mart, which according to Whyte changed city traffic patterns enough to impact falling profits. (With a half-smile and no trace of bitterness, he says: “It’s just the way things go.”) Evoking pathos, he talks on the sharp incline of online shopping, and the mounting hints of inevitability for his Six Star chain.
Soon though, Whyte, who will turn 70 this year, helms his reminiscence in a different direction.
“Variety stores are supposed to have been dead for years, but we’ve proven that wrong,” he contends. Not once, he says, did he think of switching industries. “The variety store business is a fun business. It was a great ride.”
Whyte closed his Bremerton Six Star location last year, along with a host of dollar stores he co-owned. He said he’ll phase out his remaining Six Star location in Port Orchard.
“This is a very good shopping center and the town of Poulsbo is a great place to do business,” Whyte added. “We always tried to keep it fun.”
Before opening his own shops, Whyte ran a Woolworth’s in Seattle in a time when he said ingenuity and spark outbeat corporate uniformity, a time when store managers were merchants, crafting their own styles of stock and displays.
As the industry evolved toward a more umbrellaed consistency, he began looking to other options.
“They used to call managers like me dinosaurs — that’s when I knew it was time to get out,” he said.
And he’ll do it once again, only this time after building a business all his own. Whyte recounted a man in his 30s, a long-time customer who stopped by Six Star just after going-out-of-business signs were first posted.
“He started to cry, and of course that got all of us going,” Whyte said of he and his staff, motioning tears. Later, he added, “other than missing the customers, I’m going to miss these employees something terrible.” Some of his staff have worked at Six Star since its opening in the late 1980s.
Six Star in Poulsbo will be open for a few more weeks, with bargains of 20 to 75 percent off.
As for Whyte, he isn’t quite sure what he’ll do with his free time, although one idea already looks likely: “I haven’t been doing enough fishing,” he said.
