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Declining sales, lack of parking is what led longtime Occoquan jeweler Terry Quinn to close his shop

OCCOQUAN — Quinns Goldsmith has been making and selling jewelry at the corner of Mill and Union streets since 1990.

On Friday, he sent an email to his customers telling them his Occoquan store will soon close. All that will be left of Quinns is a 3,000-square-feet retail location in Stonebridge at Potomac Town Center in Woodbridge.

And that’s the way he wants it.

“It felt like I was running around between two stores for the past seven years, said Terry Quinn, owner of Quinns Goldsmith.

Quinn moved his jewelry-making shop out of the Occoquan store — where he once lived in the apartment above the shop — to the Stonebridge location when it opened in February 2011.

Consolidating the two shops will mean that everyone he works with will once again be under one roof, with more space. It was never his plan to open multiple locations and turn Quinn’s into a chain store, he said.

The jeweler said business at his Occoquan store began to slow down nearly 10 years ago, and that’s what led to him opening his second location. The decline in Occoquan has continued, but sales have steadily increased at his Woodbridge store.

Quinn blames the decline in his Occoquan shop, in part, on the parking situation in the small town just off Interstate 95.

“The town is 19 miles south of Washington, D.C., it’s quaint, it’s pretty, but they don’t have any parking restrictions,” he said.

That forces shoppers to compete with store owners for convenient parking spaces.

“If someone bought something big like a birdhouse at one of the craft stores, they don’t want to walk it three blocks to their car,” he said.

The town council this year commissioned a parking study to see what can be done to help the problem. One solution eyed was restriping parking spaces to fit more parking in the tiny town.

The study also found a parking structure would be too costly for the town, with an estimated price tag of $25,000 per parking space.

For Quinn, all of this comes too late. And, he says no one in town has asked him to stay.

“Good luck to Occoquan,” he said.

The Occoquan location will close Sunday, Nov. 11 to prepare merchandise for a closing sale. The doors will reopen on Friday, Nov. 17 for the start of the closing sale.

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