The final Dean & DeLuca warehouse sale, and a dismal end to a once-great company

The final Wichita Dean & DeLuca warehouse sale is about to begin, but this one is different than past ones for several reasons.

First, it’s not the company holding the sale. It’s Alex Williamson of Electronix Recyclers, who has been hired by the landlord at 4727 S. Emporia to liquidate the contents of Dean & DeLuca’s former space.

Williamson says it’s “basically like they turned the key in the door one day and never came back.”

The upscale food company, which Joel Dean, Giorgio DeLuca and another partner started in New York in 1977, abandoned its warehouse near 47th and Broadway last year as its debts mounted and the chain closed stores.

If you go to the sale, which starts Thursday, it won’t be mostly food-focused, as past sales have been.

First, there’s not that much food left.

There are a few specialty items, such as purple salt, dill weed, cinnamon sticks, juniper berries, savory spice, blueberry sumac and big bags of salt with roasted garlic.

A lot of the use-by dates have passed, but Williamson has been having some afternoon snacks and reports that they’re “still good.”

There’s also Williams Family Kitchen No No sauce.

“It is a very sweet kind of barbecue sauce,” Williamson says. “Buy two get one free”

There are also are $3 spice racks.

“These were apparently a very hot commodity,” Williamson says. “One lady came by and said that her first year working here, couldn’t keep ’em in stock.”

There is none of the chain’s famous candy.

Williamson confesses that there had been “a little bit of candy left over here . . . and, yes, we did take a little bit home.”

Otherwise, the majority of what’s for sale is more like office supplies, office furniture and random items formerly associated with the company.

That includes ribbon for Dean & DeLuca gift boxes, some labeled Delta Air Lines. Why Delta?

“I kept wondering the same thing,” Williamson says. “So I googled it.”

He says he learned that Delta’s first-class passengers used to receive Dean & DeLuca gift boxes with food treats while flying on the airline.

“Gotta love Google.”

Williamson has already started selling some of what he thinks will be the hottest items at the sale: Dean & DeLuca tote bags, large and small.

“They’re really hot on eBay,” he says.

He says they’re proving popular in New York and Hawaii, where some bigger Dean & DeLuca stores were.

“They’re wanting to latch onto some of that branding,” Williamson says. “They’re wanting these bags pretty quick.”

There are also computers, pencils, paper, shelving, packing material, cold storage containers and safety backpacks with safety supplies for sale.

You could go on an all-Dean & DeLuca picnic with disposable branded soup cups and candy containers.

You could write personal notes on Dean & DeLuca cards. Williamson has been using them to price merchandise. He’s not sure who else might want them, but he knows there could be a market.

“I don’t believe in throwing away.”

There are new boxes yet to be assembled. Williamson says he’s selling them for a third of what they would cost in a store.

“That seems to be our big hot-to-trot (item).”

As former employees have begun hearing about the sale, they’re stopping by to see Williamson with tales of how they weren’t paid for the last couple of weeks of work.

Williamson says he was in the space before Dean & DeLuca vacated it. He estimates there used to be close to $75,000 worth of items he could have sold. Now, there’s maybe $30,000 to $40,000, he says.

“They sent a container from overseas and came in and took a lot of the assets,” Williamson says.

Thailand-based PACE Development bought Dean & DeLuca from Wichita and California businessman Leslie Rudd in 2014. Rudd then died in 2018.

Williamson says the former employees who are stopping by are saying things such as, “If Leslie Rudd knew anything of what was going on, he’d be turning in the grave.”

In fall 2018, Dean & DeLuca moved from its longtime headquarters at 2526 E. 36th Circle North to South Emporia. First, though, the company held a final warehouse sale at that site.

Dean & DeLuca’s sales were popular with Wichita-area shoppers, who waited in long lines and shopped crowded aisles in search of bargains.

For years, it was the only way people in this area could locally shop Dean & DeLuca, which didn’t have a store here for most of its existence.

In late 2015, a small one briefly opened in the Shops at Tallgrass, near the northeast corner of 21st and Rock Road, but closed less than six month later.

As problems and debts mounted for the troubled chain — the New York Times documented some of the issues in a scathing July 2019 story — local Dean & DeLuca employees shared their own troubles with the company.

In August 2019, Have You Heard? reported Dean & DeLuca — which at least technically still called Wichita its headquarters — slashed its IT, direct sales and purchasing departments along with a call center.

It was a dismal end to the Wichita operations. The company appears to be defunct.

The Dean & DeLuca website still lists two Hawaii stores, which are independently owned.

Kamele Collier, assistant manager at the Ritz-Carlton Residences Dean & DeLuca in Waikiki, says she assumes Dean & DeLuca is gone.

“The number that we have has been disconnected,” she says. “We don’t have any information.”

Collier says people continue to call about gift cards, products — the Hawaii stores don’t sell the same ones — and, for former employees, W2 information.

“It’s pretty sad not being able to help them.”

Williamson says the Wichita sale starts at 10 a.m. on Thursday and will be open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. “until the majority of it is gone.”

“I’m hoping to be out of here in the next 20 to 30 days.”

And then, apparently, so will be Dean & DeLuca’s final bit of history in Wichita.