Nevada City Furniture and Mattress woos bargain buyers

If you can find the place, then you can find him, behind the antique wooden roll-top desks, the new mattresses still packed in plastic, wedged between the dining chairs and tables crammed into a cavernous space hard by the Golden Center Freeway in Nevada City.

A customer calls him on the phone, and he’s the only one who will ever answer.

After all, Jim Minasian says, he’s a captive audience whose business overhead is lower than the ceilings of Nevada City furniture and Mattress.

Minasian is celebrating his 10th year in business, but in truth, the furniture and warehousing business is in his DNA.

“Having been in this business all of my life, it’s what I wanted to do,” he said.

In some ways, he didn’t have a choice. Minasian, who is of Armenian extraction, grew up in a house behind his parents’ furniture store in Fresno — Just Egypt’s furniture.

The name is derived from his father, Harry, whose family escaped the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century. Like thousands of the era, Minasian’s family settled in the fertile fields in the San Joaquin Valley, growing grapes or opening their own stores, as Minasian’s family did in central Fresno. The name of the store came from the nickname the elder Minasian took as a boxer, “Little Egypt.”

By the time he was in kindergarten, Jim Minasian was working in the store. So enamored was he with the work, Minasian wrote an essay in grammar school about his dream job — not a playwright like Fresno’s most famous Armenian son, William Saroyan, but that of a furniture store owner like his dad.

Asked how his father would feel now, as Minasian spends a 10th anniversary in a 6,000-square-foot warehouse deliberately crammed with enough furniture and tchotchkes to keep even the most discriminating bargain hunter salivating, Minasian smiles.

“I think he’d love it,” Jim Minasian said. “I think he’d be very proud of me.”

The place, by design, looks like a flea market. You won’t find much organization here: Tables and chairs and ottomans right next to old lithographs of George Washington. Coffee tables crammed next to primitive computer desks.

A few telephones look as if they still have Alexander Graham Bell’s fingerprints on them.

“So many times people come in here, and they never know what they’re going to run into. That’s the beauty of this place.”

It’s not pretentious, and that’s exactly how Minasian likes it.

“Oh, well,” Minasian says. “It is what it is. I’m a mess, and I’m proud of it. What I tell people is, if I don’t have it, they don’t need it.”

To that end, Minasian doesn’t even try to compete with the big-box stores or even with what few furniture stores remain in Nevada County.

“We give people a price point they can afford,” he said.

About 30 percent of what Minasian sells is new, including mattresses, sofas and chairs. The rest has been lovingly pre-owned at least once.

If you want new, Minasian can get it, usually from suppliers in his beloved Fresno or the Bay Area within a few days, all from glossy supply catalogues selling the stuff you might see in Roseville or Sacramento.

And if furniture isn’t your thing, Minasian carries stuff for the young — and young at heart.

Part of his store is stocked with Teddy Ruxpin toys and accessories, a throwback to the wildly popular talking teddy bear that captured the imagination of children of the 1980s. He’s got a couple of the bears on display, and even some of the programs for the latest version of the talking bruin, the last incarnation which was produced in 1991.

The connection to the toy is personal for Minasian, who worked as a warehouse manager for Ruxpin manufacturer World of Wonder in the Bay Area. The Ruxpin phenomenon spawned talking Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck toys, too.

“It was great,” Minasian said. “Talk about state of the art. It was one of those jobs where I was working and having a great time doing it.”

Minasian also worked for Apple Computer as a warehouse manager in Cupertino when the computer giant was just getting started.

Like many of his retail brethren, Minasian has seen his sales slip since the economy went south, he said. People are doing more looking than buying these days.

But like any good yard-sale or bargain hunter knows, what someone sees today might be gone tomorrow.