Time to Fold Up Her Shop
By JOAN VERDON
STAFF WRITER
Back in the 1980s, Shirley Goldberg cooked up an award-winning concept for a custom-made T-shirt store that kept her on the retail menu at Willowbrook Mall for more than 20 years.
But her store, Dine A Shirt, modeled after a 1950s style diner, won’t be on the mall’s menu after Monday. The store, which over the years has photographed tens of thousands of North Jersey babies and toddlers and emblazoned them on T-shirts, hats and coffee mugs for Father’s Day, Christmas and birthday presents, is going out of business.
The store’s lease expired this month, and owner Goldberg said the mall plans to use her space to make room for other tenants. Goldberg was one of the last independent merchants at Willowbrook, which like other large regional malls has been replacing "mom and pop" shops with national tenants.
Goldberg has been through this before. In the 1990s she also had a Dine A Shirt store at Garden State Plaza in Paramus. The store was so popular that the mall had to put up guide ropes to control the lines that snaked around the store before holidays. But in 1999, the new owner of the mall, Westfield, made a deal with a national apparel chain that wanted Dine A Shirt’s prime center-court location, and Goldberg had to give up that store when her lease expired.
Goldberg, who also owns two other stores at Westfield Garden State Plaza — Perfect Together, a jewelry store, and Perfect Accent, a bridal and special occasion shop — isn’t bitter about having to make way again for a mall’s marketing plan.
"Things change," she said. "We’re going to come back with something new, just wait."
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