For most of the 20th century, if you lived near 105 W. Lancaster Avenue in Shillington, Pennsylvania, you had a reliable constant: Seiger’s Variety Store would be there when you needed it. Late at night, early on Sunday mornings, holidays when everything else was shuttered—Seiger’s kept its lights on and its doors open.
More than just a convenience, Seiger’s became woven into the fabric of neighborhood life. It was where you grabbed last-minute thread at 9:30 p.m., picked up lunch meat and a sympathy card, or sent your kids with a couple dollars for comic books. It was where June and Pearle knew your name, and where the women behind the counter made you feel like more than a transaction.
From Ice Cream Parlor to Everything Store
The story begins in 1923, decades before the Seiger name appeared over the door. That year, Ralph and Mabel Gounder built the original building and opened a classic 1920s neighborhood attraction: an old-fashioned ice cream parlor upstairs with a soda fountain, marble-topped tables, wire-back chairs, and a candy case, with a poolroom in the basement. It was the kind of place where teenagers lingered and adults tolerated their lingering.
After a year and a half, the Gounders sold to Ralph’s brother, Howard Gounder. Ownership then passed through a Mr. Henry before landing with Luther Eshelman, who would transform the business into something Shillington residents would remember for generations.
Eshelman kept the sweets and fountain service, but he expanded ambitiously. He added thread, shoes, pea coats, underwear, and children’s clothing—all displayed on long flat tables. When a local merchant known as “Butch Mary” closed up, Eshelman absorbed that business too, bringing in groceries and lunch meats. By the late 1930s and 1940s, what had started as an ice cream parlor had evolved into a true general store—a neighborhood supply line that stocked a little of everything for people who lived within walking distance.
The Seigers: Modernizing Without Losing Heart
When Lena and Paul Seiger bought the store from Eshelman, they made a crucial choice: they modernized it without stripping away its personality. They installed carpet, added air conditioning, upgraded the lighting, and gave the interior a cleaner, more intentional layout. They took a beloved but old-fashioned corner store and made it somewhere you’d be proud to stop, not just somewhere you had to.
This mattered. By the 1950s and 1960s, Lancaster Avenue was changing. The Shillington Shopping Center brought in Food Fair and W.T. Grant. Farther down the corridor, larger chains cycled through: Sears, Nichol’s, and later Phar-Mor. These were the years when national retailers rewrote the rules of Berks County shopping, when malls and big boxes with sprawling parking lots were supposed to make little corner stores obsolete.
The Seigers’ answer was to lean into what the chains couldn’t match: service, hours, and personal presence.
Open Every Day—Even Christmas
One detail defines Seiger’s in community memory: it was open every single day of the year, staying lit until 10 p.m. long after other shops went dark.
Need thread, a greeting card, milk, shoelaces, school socks, or sliced lunch meat at 9:30 on a Tuesday night? Seiger’s. Comic books for a restless kid on Sunday morning before a road trip? Seiger’s. A last-minute Hallmark sympathy card when every other shop had closed? Seiger’s.
That Hallmark detail is worth noting. The greeting card giant typically didn’t place its line in small independent variety stores, preferring larger, more controlled card departments. But Seiger’s volume and reliability earned it that account, giving the store rows of premium cards instead of cheap rack options. For a corner variety store, that was a surprisingly upscale touch—and it made Seiger’s the go-to for birthdays, funerals, baptisms, and apologies.
In a pre-24-hour-Walmart world, Seiger’s wasn’t just selling merchandise. It was selling timing. It was there when everything else was closed.
“Everybody Knew June”
After Paul and Lena Seiger’s era, Walter and Esther Howe took over in April 1969, maintaining the same community-friendly rhythm and, crucially, keeping familiar faces behind the counter.
Customers remember names: Pearle Gehman, the manager; June Heckman, known to everyone simply as “June”; and Mary M. Gottschall, who worked there for 20 years. For many regulars, these women were the store. Community memories consistently describe Seiger’s as a “friendly, women-led counter,” with tributes singling out “Madge & all the ‘girls’ @ the Variety store” for creating the welcoming atmosphere that kept people coming back.
This wasn’t accidental. The person behind the counter already knew why you’d walked in. Kids could go there on their own without worry. Older neighbors could lean on the counter and talk. You weren’t just a transaction—you were a neighbor.
That personal touch gave Seiger’s a social gravity that a 40,000-square-foot chain store simply couldn’t replicate.
More Than Merchandise
Seiger’s had a quiet specialty that regulars prized: prepared food. Pearle Gehman is remembered for cooking items that regulars sought out—not factory-sealed trays, but the kind of in-house food you bought because you trusted the person who made it. Regulars noted, “If you couldn’t find what you needed, there was a good chance of finding it at Seiger’s.”
This fit a classic Berks County pattern: the neighborhood “variety” that blended groceries, small household goods, magazines and comics, and counter-made specialties. You could walk out with bologna, thread, a comic book, and a piece of advice. You could grab a magazine, hosiery, and something for dinner—and never move your car.
It was built for a walkable Shillington, where you knew your neighbors and didn’t need to “go out shopping” to shop.
Holding the Line
By all conventional retail logic, Seiger’s shouldn’t have survived the 1960s and 1970s. The big boxes had more square footage, more aisles, more parking, lower prices. One-stop shopping at scale was supposed to be the future.
But Seiger’s survived for decades because it wasn’t competing on the chains’ terms. It was offering immediacy, individual attention, and trust. It became the store you went to when the “real stores” were closed. The store you sent your kid to with a few dollars and no worry. The store where you stopped for “just one thing” and ended up talking for twenty minutes.
That wasn’t nostalgia. That was function.
The End of an Era
The Seiger family gradually passed from the story. Paul Seiger died in 1970. Lena R. Seiger died on May 22, 2003—long after the store itself had closed.
Community recollections and a surviving photograph help narrow down the end. By June 1987, the storefront at 105 W. Lancaster Avenue was photographed as “out of business,” placing the closure sometime in the months before mid-1987. A former customer recalled buying a Walt Disney comic there that year—one of the last transactions in a store that had served the neighborhood for more than six decades.
What Remains
The building didn’t die with the store. Like many older Lancaster Avenue commercial properties, 105 W. Lancaster Avenue kept working. Over the years, it housed various small businesses. In the 2010s, Salon Flo moved in and remains there today, part of a new wave of service and specialty shops reusing old retail footprints rather than tearing them down.
Seiger’s Variety Store is gone, but what it represented—a place that was always there, always open, always reliable—remains lodged in Shillington’s collective memory. Not just as a store, but as proof that sometimes the smallest places meet the biggest needs.
I cried when I read this. My grandmother or as I called her Nanny is Pearle. I worked at Seiger’s from age nine into my college years. I always tell people I learned more in that store than any high school or college ever offered me. Thank you so much for remembering!
This was truly a family friendly neighborhood store . My mother work there for several years. I worked there for 5 years stocking the shelves, sweeping the pavement, and waiting on customers.
It holds some of my fondest memories.