Wade & Dowland Ceasing Operations On June 30

By Benjamin Cox on April 11, 2021 at 2:59pm

A long-time Jacksonville office supply business will close its doors at the end of June after 6 decades in business. Wade & Dowland Office Equipment, Inc. will cease its operations by no later than June 30th. Owner Steven Quigg says his age along with the pandemic factored into the decision to close: “[The pandemic] definitely didn’t help. We lost some people during that, and there has been other places that have closed that were customers or it cut them way back, too. Therefore, we didn’t sell as much. It had a bearing [on the decision], and we just sold our building. That was a pretty nice deal for us and helped with some of the decision to close.”

The building located at 202 North Sandy across from the Post Office has been in operation since 1961 opened by the late J. Merle Wade and Harry Dowland. Quigg and his wife have been a part of the store since 1983. In a letter to customers on Thursday, the store announced that service agreements will be honored through May 15th. The store will be auditing accounts through the coming months and will send out any outstanding invoices. Quigg says that a clearance sale to clear out remaining inventory will come in July: “We are going to kind of do business as usual until we are gone until the end of June. Then, we will try to take the month of July to get rid of our remaining inventory.”

Quigg says thank you to all of the customers and businesses for their long standing business and friendships: “Thank you to everyone. It’s been kind of fun. I didn’t dream that I would ever do it this long. By the time I get done, I’ll have 46 years of it myself. We’ve had some really good customers, loyal customers and we are very fortunate in that case. It’s kind of sad, but everything has it’s time.”

Quigg says that if you have any questions, you may come by the store during regular business hours or give them a call at 217-243-3379.