Bridal Shop Closing Due to Ebola Nurse's Visit May Be Saved After All

Yesterday, we reported that Akron Ohio’s Coming Attractions bridal store — now known to many only as “the Ebola shop” — was closing due to the fact that no one wanted to buy dresses from a place where someone with Ebola (who has been cured) had been at one point in time. Now, the store might be saved!

As mentioned in previous posts, it’s incredibly unfair that the store, which does not have Ebola, will never have Ebola and even shut its doors voluntarily for a quarantine when Ebola was even mentioned has lost so much business due to the fact that people don’t understand how Ebola spreads or that they’re unlikely to contract it. In fact, what’s most unfair is that according to owner Anna Younker people began asking for refunds because they didn’t feel comfortable wearing clothes that someone who’d had Ebola may have breathed on at some point and telling Younker that family members had told them they wouldn’t feel safe “touching the brides” on their wedding day if they wore a gown worn from the store. In fact, the news got so overblown that Younker said people called up asking if someone had really died of Ebola while in the shop? Really? In the shop? I’d pretty much close up after all that nonsense too.

Younker’s story may have a happy ending, though. After the initial announcement of her store’s closure hit the news, friends and, according to WKSU, even strangers started calling her to offer support and assistance in the form of Gofundme fundraisers. And while the store’s current location must close so that Younker can meet financial obligations, the mayor has stepped in (isn’t that really quaint? A city saving a bridal shop?) to offer his help and has even suggested the possibility of moving the store to a new location, one that has no association with Ebola, something that might be possible only with the city’s help as the store’s “image” problem made it difficult for Younker to get credit or loans.

Younker’s overwhelmed by the support and is happy to have some hope — her store had been open for 30 years, after all — but I could also see her giving the entire thing up. It’s hard to imagine what a toll like the scare she’s had could take on a person. How do you even survive a phone call during which someone asks if Ebola had killed anyone while they were casually browsing a Vera Wang original?