Cell company occupies old tractor dealership

What once was old is new again.

The building on Bus. 29 that housed Culpeper Motor Corp. for five decades is now home to Verizon Wireless Cellular Sales.

“This is our business model,” said Jay Vaiksnoras, regional director of Cellular Sales, the nation’s largest Verizon wireless retailer. “We wanted to be in Culpeper.”

Cellular Sales opened its first store here in 2009 in Dominion Square Shopping Center just up the highway. That location closed following the Dec. 31 opening of the new location at 401 James Madison Highway.

Vaiksnoras said the Knoxville, Tenn.-based company invested about $300,000 to renovate the old Culpeper Motor Corp. building, formerly trimmed in orange.

Now trimmed in black and red neon, the Cellular Sales center is high-tech all the way offering the latest in phones and devices including the immensely popular iPhone, the store’s hottest item. Also for sale is the Blackberry, DROID products, Hotshots, Spectrums and Revolutions along with cell plans and service.

“We saw an opportunity here where most people wouldn’t,” Vaiksnoras said of the major rehab in the 3,600-square-feet space. “This is our commitment to the community.”

The company’s “unrelenting focus” is on the customer, he added, and forming a lifetime relationship.

“Culpeper is a smaller community where people appreciate that little extra touch – that personal service,” said Vaiksnoras.

The company had been looking to relocate to a standalone site along the busy Bus. 29 corridor, he said.

“We like the location,” Vaiksnoras said. “It’s big and on the main drag.”

The Culpeper site is intended to serve as regional hub, he said, noting the closet Cellular Sales stores are in Fredericksburg and Richmond.

In addition to investing in the building rehab, the company is looking to hire. On a recent afternoon, Vaiksnoras was overseeing a job fair just prior to a ribbon cutting and after-hours mixer with the Culpeper Chamber of Commerce. He said they look to have 12 people staff the Culpeper store. Cellular Sales employees average more than $51,000 per year, according to Vaiksnoras.

He said they are already seeing more foot traffic in the new location.

“It’s more inviting to the customer,” said Vaiksnoras, adding, “We are here to stay.”

According to a company release, Cellular Sales is one of the fastest growing retail companies in the U.S. with 32 locations in Virginia and nearly 500 nationwide. For information about the new Culpeper store, call (540) 829-9214.

As for the history there, M.E. Rudy opened Culpeper Motor Corp. in the location in 1958, when the town limits stopped at the Mountain Run Bridge on North Main Street. Through the years, the place sold tractors, agricultural implements, chainsaws, GMC Trucks and Cub Cadets, introducing the orange trim around the top of the building.

“When we moved out here we started selling chainsaws and things like that and the town said we had to stop doing that, we were making too much racket,” Mr. Rudy, a World War II veteran, told the Star-Exponent in 2008. “The next thing I knew we were in town,” he said of the 1968 town expansion.

As the town prepares to grow again later this year, much that was old is becoming new again.