The closing of Mail Vault came as a shock to me. Unlike TK W and Heidi, the first thing I thought was that something had happened to Mike, because I knew he would never have walked away from the place he'd worked so hard to make successful. Mike spent months and months remodeling that store, almost completely by himself, doing all the construction, putting in the new mail boxes, painting, laying the wooden floor, and setting up that gate. And doing it all after hours. Talk about blood, sweat and tears! Many of us watched in amazement as he was able to segregate the mailboxes from the rest of the store so he could put up a gate for customers, which, for the first time in the 20 years that place has been there, allowed customers to pick up their mail whenever they wanted to.
Mike transformed the Mail Vault, and the only thing that would have made him close the doors and walk away from all his hard work was death or being locked out by the landlord. Seriously, you think he worked that hard, brought in so much more business, and then just walked away? Like Mark E, while picking my mail up at the post office, I asked them if they knew what happened to the Mail Vault. They said that Mike had nothing to do with it, but the landlord forced him out with just a couple of days' notice because Safeway wanted the space to expand. I do know the Safeway at Hayden & Chaparral has already started expanding into spaces on the west of that store. The Mail Vault now has a sign they put up that someone will be there from 9 to 6 each weekday until August 31st, in order for people to pick up any mail that was trapped inside.