T-R PHOTO BY LANA BRADSTREAM Wendy Siefken, owner of Thrifty Buzzarr, looks through some books while the store was still on Main Street. The business is in the process of relocating to the Marshalltown Mall and will still offer the same deals customers have come to appreciate.

There’s a new tenant set to open up shop at the Marshalltown Mall and the tenant is from downtown.

The Thrifty Buzzarr, formerly known as the Main Street Thrifty Buzzarr, had its last day at 122 E. Main St. on June 6 and is setting up shop at 2500 S. Center St. The store will be open Aug. 3 and will be marked with a grand opening.

The business will be open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.

With a bigger location comes excitement from Thrifty Buzzarr staff.

“I’m excited, because it’s bigger than what we had before, we’ve got better parking here and we’re still handicap accessible,” Thrifty Buzzarr owner Wendy Siefken said. “I love uptown, but they really don’t have a lot of parking for people. Even for people working in the store, you can only have two or three cars behind your building.”

Siefken said they wanted to keep the Thrifty Buzzarr name so customers don’t get confused by the name change from Main Street Thrifty Buzzarr to just the Thrifty Buzzarr.

“It’s still got some of the same name. So that way people could still find us because of the weird spelling of Buzzarr,” Siefken said. “So most people realize that first so we’re just going to be the Thrifty Buzzarr.”

In order to lessen the load they had in moving stores, Siefken said there was a significant downsizing effort.

“We did a big push sale on the clothes, and used books just to try and downsize on that, so we didn’t have as much to move,” Siefken said.

After the downsizing and closing of the shop came the start of the moving process.

Since the middle of May, the Thrifty Buzzarr has been packing up items and moving them to the location at the mall, located just north of the Planet Fitness.

Part of the agreement with the new tenants at the Main Street location required the Thrifty Buzzarr to move out by July 1.

At the forefront of the moving process has been Siefken’s daughter Angel, who Siefken said has been an intrical part in moving from location to location.

Siefken said her daughter and her son Charlie have been working nearly every day in the past two months to get the items the old moved over to new.

While the location of the store may have changed, the idea of what the store is has not.

“We have a little bit of everything,” Siefken said. “It’s a hodge-podge of everything, It’s kind of like an old-time Walmart with better prices.”

This includes refurbished items, repurposed items, household books, used folding furniture and more.

Some products are brought in by individuals from outside Marshall County.

“We have a gentleman who is bringing in from Des Moines. He’s bringing in games and different books, and different collectibles and we have a young gentleman who makes steampunk items for us,” Siefken said.

Teachers can come in and get big discounts on items and sometimes will do book exchanges.

“Sometimes they exchange books, they’ll bring in 10 books, and they’ll get 10 books. That way, they can kind of swap out and they’re not spending so much money,” secretary/receptionist Angie Swope said.

Additional items Siefken said will be in the store include jewelry, crystals, steampunk items and more.

In addition to selling items to regular customers in store, Siefken said they have worked out some deals with a customer who sends shoes in mass quantities to Africa.

“There’s a gentleman that came up and he sends things to Africa. He’s a missionary, ” she said. “So we helped him get a lot of shoes and we did a special deal for him to make it really cheap for him so that way he could send them overseas in mass quantities. We help out with that. We aren’t a nonprofit, but just help out where we can.”

With being on a new side of town comes the potential of meeting new people.

“I’m excited to see new faces and for the chance to get to know a different part of Marshalltown,” Siefken said. “We’ve been up in the Main Street area for three years. Now we’re going to be out here and it’s just going to get a hold of a bunch of people, but we’re still having people come from uptown, too as well.”

Like most businesses across the United States, the Thrifty Buzzarr was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s really just made us think outside the box of how to still get customers to be interested whether it’s doing mystery grab bags, they pay you through Facebook, and then you leave the books outside for them and everything’s clean and sanitized and to getting toilet paper and hand sanitizer, so that way you could stay open,” Siefken said.

She said the store was able to stay afloat through the pandemic.

“We managed to stay in business. I managed to keep my bills paid every month. There wasn’t a whole lot left over but that was enough to keep us open,” Siefken said.

Swope said operating the store in the midst of the pandemic was a “very big learning experience.”

Contact Sam Stuve at 641-753-6611 or sstuve@timesrepublican.com.