As a crane lowered a bright green dinosaur from the roof of the Wheatsville Co-op on Guadalupe Street Sunday morning, a crowd gathered in the parking lot below to pay their respects to the store’s mascot before the location concluded its last day of business.
The ‘Mangiasaurus,’ a bright green, 11-foot-tall, 800-pound foam dinosaur, has occupied the store’s roof since 2007. Movers used a crane to lower the statue onto a flatbed, where it was then relocated to Wheatsville’s second location on South Lamar Boulevard. A parade of bikers followed the truck, who rode with the Mangiasaurus to its new home in South Austin.
Wheatsville board president Brandon Hines and board member Dave Addenbrook, who participated in a bike parade to honor the store’s closure, wore green dinosaur costumes in honor of the mascot’s relocation. Hines, a Wheatsville owner for over thirty years, said that while he’s sad to see the Guadalupe store close, he believes in the strength of their remaining South Lamar location and the Co-op’s mission.
“Wheatsville is more than a grocery store,” Hines wrote in an email. “There are no corporate owners extracting profits for summer homes or rocket ships. Every dollar of profit is reinvested in the coop and, when times are good, redistributed to the more than 27,000 owners.”
Hines wrote that Wheatsville operates as a “community owned cooperative” where financial contributors are rewarded with partial ownership of the business. Owners elect members to a board of directors that collaborates to make business decisions for the Co-op.
Wheatsville announced in an Oct. 12 Facebook post that the Guadalupe store would end its operations after Oct. 25. The Co-op website said the closure is due to the store’s poor “financial performance and viability.” The board initially considered moving to locations of the Austin “Fresh Plus” grocery chain, but abandoned the plan after determining it to be not financially viable. The building that housed the Guadalupe store is now up for lease.
Wheatsville, named after the first Black community in Austin, first opened for business in 1976 and moved to its Guadalupe location in 1981. Co-op General Manager Tanya Carney said the success of the Guadalupe store allowed owners to open the South Lamar location in 2013.
The store slowed operations in the weeks leading up to the closure and offered discounts on remaining items, according to Wheatsville’s Facebook. Customers who visited the location Sunday were offered free coffee, bagels and buy-one-get-one breakfast tacos to commemorate the end of the store.
The closure also fell on Mangiasaurus Day, an unofficial local holiday established by former Austin Mayor Will Wynn on Oct. 25, 2004, after the dinosaur was damaged in a botched high school prank earlier that year, according to reporting by KVUE.
Members of the paleontology department at UT restored the sculpture, which was reinstalled on the roof of Mangia’s Pizza, the previous home for the monster and its namesake. Now that it has left Guadalupe, Mangiasaurus is set to take residence in the South Lamar Wheatsville store’s produce section, Hines wrote.
“It’s definitely the end of an era, but the beginning of a new chapter,” Carney said. “We’re excited to be able to continue to serve Austin.”
