Store owner disappears, upsets patrons

After taking his computer there in September for repair work the store eventually said it could not do, the Fine Arts graduate student went to the store's only location on 40th and Walnut streets last month to pick up the still-broken IBM clone. But when he got there, he found the door locked and the window covered with brown paper. He tried calling, only to find that the store's phone was disconnected. Now, two months after his first trip to the store, Chalfen said he has not heard from the store's owner and is still waiting for his computer to be returned. "I want my computer back," he said Monday. "That's $1000 I don't have." Dan Shaffery, the owner of the Penn Computer Store, could not be reached for comment yesterday, and what he plans do now remains a mystery. Real Estate Project Manager Helen Walker, who manages the University-owned building, said Shaffery told her a month ago he was closing his store. She said he told her two weeks ago that he would begin contacting customers to arrange for them to pick up their equipment. As of last night, however, the doors remained locked and the customers' equipment was still inside the store. It is not clear how many other customers have found themselves in Chalfen's position since the store closed. But the sudden closing has inconvenienced at least some who did business with the store, including Campus Computer Rentals Inc., a Massachusetts-based company which rented Macintosh computers to students through the store. Paul Martecchini, the company's president, said yesterday that he received "no advance warning" the store would close and that a small amount of his company's inventory was still inside the store. Martecchini said he was "really quite upset about the whole thing" and his company would look for another campus-area computer store to rent its computers. Until then, he said students could rent and service the company's Macintosh models at Temple University's bookstore. A representative from the company was in town yesterday to look into the problem. Walker said the store was not very far behind on its rent payments, adding that what probably forced the store to close was its inability to compete with cheaper mail order companies and other stores in the area.

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