Before Bob Blumenthal closed Blumenthal's on Hamburger Square and moved the store to the suburbs, about 100 people came in wanting to buy what was not for sale.
They sought the store's vintage blue porcelain exterior signs crowded with slogans and the names of products sold in the store, or better, once sold.
The signs had been up for at least 60 years. They were erected by Bob's father, Abe Blumenthal, who founded the store in 1926 and came up with its slogans "The Store with the Heart" and "We Sell for Less."
The products advertised on the signs included knickers, which Blumenthal's hadn't carried in 50 years. The porcelain also boasted of Bell Bell work clothes and jeans.
Blue Bell Inc. vanished 20 years when bought by VF Corp. Even when Blue Bell was still around, the company's logo - a bell - looked woefully outdated on Blumenthal's facade. It was a plain old bell. The company had years before jazzed up the bell to make it more abtract.
Bob Blumenthal did sell a piece of one sign to an antique dealer and gave to the Greensboro Historical Museum one of the two neon signs from inside the store. The interior signs offered free cigarettes to customers if their sales receipts had a certain series of numbers.
Never mind that Bluementhal's quit selling cigarettes years ago. Bob and Abe Blumenthal, who died at age 91 in 1993, were not about to change signs that had been hanging from the ceiling for 60 years. The signs outside also advertised cigarettes.
The neon sign Blumenthal kept now hangs in his new store in the Price Place Shopping Center on West Market Street.
He gives a bandana instead of smokes to customers with the correct series of numbers.
As for the rest of old signs, Blumenthal retains custody. He plans to use them as wall decorations at the new store, which opened two and a half weeks ago. At his wife's request, he transferred to the couple's house one small sign with the name Blumenthal's. It decorates the front door.
Blumenthal also refused to part with the old store's antique wood display tables and sales counter. They now serve the new store. His goal, he says, is to make the new look as much like the old as possible.
That means as few frills as possible. But he won't be able to duplicate the manhole cover on the floor of the old store. When Abe Blumenthal expanded the store years ago, he built on space that included a manhole cover. He decided to leave it.
And there's one other major difference between the old and new: the floors.
The old store's were concrete.
"My legs will tell you they were concrete," says Bluementhal, who stood on them for the 37 years he worked in the downtown store.
Sounding apologetic, he says carpet was already there when he relocated.
Oh, one Blumenthal's sign remains downtown. It's atop the building, which is believed to be more than 100 years old, reportedly a former blacksmith shop.
"It would take a crane to get it down," Blumenthal says. "Besides, it's probably holding up the building."
"And that's only because the carpet was already there," he says.