Rumors Boutique is a buy, sell and trade thrift store that has comfortably sat near the intersection of West Franklin Street and North Graham in Chapel Hill for the past seven years  – becoming somewhat of a staple for fashion gurus in the area.

But as COVID-19 has swept through the nation, this small business has not been spared from financial hardship.

Rumors Boutique re-opened its doors this past Saturday. The thrift shop’s storefront had been closed to the public since March 17 and it’s been a bumpy road since.

“So I haven’t had one day off,” Longyear said. “I have literally worked from when I woke up to when I went to sleep since then.”

That’s Casey Longyear – one of the co-owners of Rumors.

Longyear said before Phase 1 of the state’s re-opening went into effect this past Friday, she had to completely change the way Rumors operated to stay afloat while the storefront was closed.

“We totally switched from being a storefront that posted on Instagram mainly to show people what we had to relying on what we’re posting on Instagram for sales,” Longyear said. “Before COVID-19, we maybe sold $50 worth of things purely from what we posted and I got up to doing up to $600 a day while we were closed.”

Longyear said she thinks this online model was successful because it allowed people to still feel like they were “treasure hunting” in a thrift store versus just online shopping.

“It felt like you were still going to a thrift store and finding a treasure because if you saw it first, you got it,” Longyear said. “As opposed to a website where anyone can log onto it at any time and buy what’s there.”

While switching to an online model proved fairly successful, it wasn’t an easy task, especially as Longyear was operating as ‘one woman show’ – taking photos and putting clothes up online to sell, shipping orders out and stopping everything to bring out orders to cars during curbside-pickup.

While she is grateful for all the business, Longyear said every penny that was earned went towards paying sales taxes and that left nothing in the bank to pay herself or her staff. Despite this, she is still doing her best to make it work.

On May 9, Rumors opened back up their storefront with new hours from noon to six p.m. and put several health and safety measures in place to keep everyone safe.

“It’s going okay,” Longyear said. “We’ve never had a line out front and we haven’t had any issues with too many people coming in. We’ve put a 10-person cap on it just to be safe because it is an intimate shopping space and we are asking that everyone wears a mask inside.”

And to answer your question, yes Rumors is still accepting clothing at this time – but only for store credit.

“We’re a different kind of business where people can come in and make money as opposed to just spend money,” Longyear said. “I mean we spend thousands of dollars into the community a month as we buy clothing from people so I was getting phone call after phone call of people disappointed that we weren’t buying clothes because it’s a way they knew they could rely on to get extra money.”

She said while it’s been slow business, with maybe only about 20 customers per day, it’s still worth it to be open as finances are tight.

Longyear said while she has already been approved, she still hasn’t received her Paycheck Protection Program loan, otherwise known as a PPP Loan, from the government. This loan allows small businesses with less than 500 employees to finance up to two-and-a-half months of employee payroll.

Without this loan, everything is made harder, as there isn’t enough money to bring back full-time employees to help share the workload.

“Because we haven’t received a PPP loan yet, I’m not officially asking everyone to come back yet because I don’t want the people on unemployment to risk losing anything that they need,” Longyear said.

The Rumors in Chapel Hill is just one of the store’s three locations. Longyear said they are going to attempt to open up their Durham location this Saturday.

For more information on Rumors, their locations and operations during COVID-19, visit the shop’s website.

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