Eastside Debs Store reopens with credit union and career center

Joe Debs leaned against the counter on Tuesday between a pair of registers and the memories returned. A smile did as well.

After 13 years of effort and exasperation, his family’s Eastside staple will return on Wednesday. This time, a new nonprofit called The Corner at Debs Store will be more than just a grocery store.

The Corner will provide fresh food in a neighborhood that has lacked access to fresh groceries for more than a decade, yes. But it will also serve as a community hub and financial institution.

Debs’ father, Nick, and uncle, Eugene, operated the Debs Store grocery at the corner of Florida Avenue and 5th Street for more than 60 years. His grandfather, Nicolas, opened the business in 1921. It closed in 2011 shortly after Nick died in March of that year.

“They were part of the fabric of the Eastside. They felt that,” Debs said during a recent appearance on WJCT News 89.9’s First Coast Connect . “Many of the residents didn’t have phones or (ways of) reaching out beyond the neighborhood…it was routine for messages to be left, for messages to be left for residents to come get their messages. It was a gathering place.”

The hope is for that to be be the case again.

LIFT JAX, a non-profit focused on eradicating poverty on the Eastside has sought to reopen Debs Store since 2020. Its CEO, David Garfunkel, met Debs in 2019. The two began conversations in 2020 and have worked in the years since toward Wednesday’s ribbon-cutting. Several partners have joined their journey.

Goodwill Industries of North Florida will operate and manage a grocery on the first floor. Upstairs will be a career center as well as the VyStar Financial Fitness Center to provide one-on-one connection and counseling with unbanked people who live Out East, a first of its kind for Northeast Florida’s largest credit union, according to Lysa Barbano, VyStar’s Florida market president.

Goodwill is making a foray into the grocery business, an industry with tight profit margins. “We’ve been in North Florida since 1940. We’re an established retailer. We’ve had a number of other companies that we’ve run – a laundry facility, a landscaping company, governmental contracts, food service – so, we bring all of that to the table,” Goodwill Industries of North Florida CEO David Rey says. But collaboration is what will make this venture truly sustainable, he says.

Baptist Health, Florida Blue, the Jaguars Foundation, The Players Championship, JWB Real Estate Capital as well as the Jacksonville Transportation Authority are among the organizations that have contributed either financial or in-kind donations or services to the effort.

The Corner at Debs Store plans to stock more than 20 local vendors inside the grocer. Whether it’s honey from Little Black Box Baked Goods, coffee from Catbird Coffee Roasters; bread from Community Loaves, turkey legs from Azar & Co., or  milk from Miami-based dairy Yo Gusto, The Corner at Debs Store will sell locally sourced fresh food in the historically Black Eastside neighborhood as food insecurity is rising across the country.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than a quarter of Black households (25.1%) nationwide reported that children in the home sometimes or often did not have enough to eat during the previous week, compared to 9.1% of white households, 14. 5% of Asian households and 20.6% of Hispanic households.

The store will also provide employment for area residents, like Lenisa Robinson, a third-generation Eastsider who will work at the new Debs Store.

“I’m excited. We haven’t had anything like this,” Robinson says. “Everything is organic, healthy food. It’s a great start for the community. This is awesome.”

Elsewhere in Duval County, there have been other attempts to eradicate food insecurity through community partnerships and government grants, with mixed results. The town of Baldwin operated a nonprofit grocery store for five years , but it closed earlier this year. In 2019, the Jacksonville City Council provided $850,000 in incentives to Jacksonville-based Southeastern Grocers to open a Winn-Dixie at the Gateway Shopping Plaza in the Northside’s Norwood neighborhood.

Barbano says Wednesday’s groundbreaking can be attributed to the Debs family’s commitment to ensure their legacy.

“(Joe Debs) was able to get the rest of the community, the business community involved and engaged in a way that is different from other stories that have been put together,” Barbano says. “By bringing together this wonderful group of leaders together – businesses that want to make a difference – I think we are assured that this is going to continue.”

That’s what brought a smile to Joe Debs’ face on Tuesday afternoon. A grocery store with his family’s name on it feeding another generation of Eastside residents.

Earlier this summer, Debs recalled that someone asked him during his father’s funeral procession when the store would reopen. He now has an answer.

Wednesday morning at 10:30 a.m.

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