For the second time this year, a Sure Save Super Market establishment will close its doors.
The Wiki-Wiki Mart and adjacent Wiki-Wiki Kitchen on Kamehameha Avenue in Hilo are shutting down June 30. A close-out inventory sale at the market is ongoing.
Sure Save president Carl Okuyama said in an email to the Tribune-Herald that the market was no longer profitable.
In February, Sure Save closed Island Market, its grocery store in Naalehu, after 18 years in business.
“With the shutdown of that one, it was hard to stay afloat,” Wiki-Wiki Mart store manager Tom Sanborn said Tuesday.
Sanborn said he and the five other employees at the market and kitchen learned of the decision to close last week.
“It only started hitting us recently,” Sanborn said of the news.
He said business has been steady this week as regulars and newcomers learned of the close-out sale.
“They’re still coming in,” Sanborn said.
Alcohol and cigarettes (“All the vices,” Sanborn said) have been selling fast. Other customers have come in to stock up on household items such as toilet paper.
The convenience store is within walking distance to residences on Banyan Drive, where many of the Wiki-Wiki Mart’s regular customers live.
“They’ve been saying, ‘Oh, where are we going to go?’” Sanborn said.
“(I) would like to say thank you to the loyal customers and hard-working employees,” Okuyama said. “Saying goodbye is never easy.”
He said there were no announcements for future plans, but that “our faith believes new doors and opportunities will come.”
A Wiki-Wiki Mart in Naalehu now is the last Sure Save storefront on the island. It will remain open, Okuyama said, and is “doing very well.”
The online Sure Save grocery store, which was the first of its kind in Hawaii, also still is open for business.
The company that became Sure Save was founded in 1933 by Okuyama’s grandfather and opened its first convenience store in Hilo in 1978. That store, located at Ainaloa Drive and Kawailani Street, closed in 2002.
E-mail Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
