Barnett Jewelers store manager Susan Barnett Ricke said the Downtown store in the Wells Fargo Center closed Thursday.
With the lights off and doors shut Monday, there was no sign the company had been there the past 41 years.
Ricke said the inventory was moved to Barnett Jewelers’ River City Marketplace store at 13249 City Square Drive.
“It was just not going to work in the building,” Ricke said of the tower where Jacksonville-based Barnett Jewelers has operated since 1976.
She said there weren’t enough customers in the building to sustain the space. “We needed more traffic,” she said.
Barnett Jewelers, a family business, considered downsizing but Ricke said that wasn’t presented as an option in the building.
A possible Riverside location didn’t meet their needs, either, she said.
“We are very hopeful that all of our customers that we’ve taken care of for years and years and years will find us out here,” she said from the North Jacksonville store, which opened in November 2012.
The move brings the family together — Ricke, her brother, Bill, and his son and daughter-in-law, Oscar and Anna.
Barnett Jewelers began its closing sale at Wells Fargo Center in October and was going to run it through Christmas, but stayed five months more.
Ricke said she and her brother looked at other locations, “but in the long run, we didn’t find anything that we thought would be a good fit for us.”
Barnett Jewelers was an original tenant in the former Independent Life Building. It opened soon after Independent Life & Accident Insurance Co. employees moved into the tower in late 1975, she said.
When Independent Life was the anchor tenant, about 2,500 people worked in the building, said Bill Barnett in a previous interview.
Ricke said in November that while the building was more than 80 percent leased, there weren’t as many people there as before and that the building is closed to the public Saturday and Sunday.
Ricke’s grandfather started the company in 1917. Oscar Barnett represents the fourth generation.
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