Vacuums R Us & Sewing Too – Boulder Store – Vacuum & Sewing Machine Sales and Repair in Boulder

We know that for many of you, we’ve been a valued service, and our absence will be felt. We want our departure to land as gently as possible, so here’s what we’re offering.  

We’ll maintain your accounts, including accrued reward points, for two years. Points are tied to your email address, and if you order using that email, you can use them on our website. Gift cards never expire. They can’t be redeemed online but if you email us what you need, we’ll create an order by hand. Both points and gift cards are also good at any current or future Vacuums R Us & Sewing Too location. All Colorado orders ship free and arrive in 1-2 days. You can find supplies for your machine at https://www.vacuumsrus.com/Schematics/all-brands/, or just email us and we’ll look up what your product uses.  

We’d love to keep serving you at our other stores, but we understand the drive might be a hassle. So, we wholeheartedly recommend these reputable, family-owned shops near Boulder:  

Riccar: Broomfield Vacuums and Longmont Vacuums  

Sebo and Miele: Broomfield Vacuums  

Baby Lock sewing repair: Maggie’s Sewing, Longmont  

These shops have been our fiercest competitors for years. Their dedication to excellence pushed us to be better, and every time one of us thought we were the best, the other raised the bar. We’re confident they’ll give you the same expertise you came to expect from us.  

Boulder customers with Red Carpet Vacuum Service plans can use them at our other stores. We’ll take appointments from former Boulder customers for same-day turnaround, so you can drop your machine off in the morning, run your errands, and pick it up that afternoon. We’re also extending free shampooer rentals to 48 hours to help with the travel time.  

Our industry isn’t glamorous, but it’s real. Everyone, from every walk of life, needs a clean home. We met all kinds of people at every stage of life in this store and got to know so many of you far better than you’d expect. We welcomed new babies and mourned loved ones passing. We celebrated your weddings and engagements. We talked shit about your exes (oh yes, we sure did). We watched puppies grow up, and we cried with you when they went gray and crossed the rainbow bridge. Every day our team unlocked these doors eager to help people solve one of life’s most basic problems with expertise, creativity, and empathy. Thank you for letting us.  

Now we’re going to do something uncharacteristic. But why not? Anyone who knows this company knows uncharacteristic is sort of our thing. You’re the reason we made it six years here. You’re the reason we stayed when, in 2023, we realized this store would run at a loss for the foreseeable future. Every dollar you spent kept the lights on, whether it was a $6 vacuum belt or a $6,000 sewing machine. We could stay because of you, and we wanted to. So, we think you, yes, you specifically, deserve the truth about why we’re leaving.  

We believe Boulder is ill, and we believe it’s terminal. There are three issues here. Any one of them we probably could have faced down. All three together, we can’t.  

We opened in Boulder in the summer of 2020, at the absolute height of the pandemic. Our industry saw a huge turnover that year. One of the two existing stores, Boulder Vacuum, had owners already thinking about retirement, and the health danger of working with the public in the pandemic pushed them to do it. We bought their assets and opened the day after they closed.  

The other store was being sold to a chain out of Denver. We knew the chain well, because our Arvada store sits a few minutes from one of theirs. That family has operated in Colorado for decades, and their previous businesses were shut down twice by the state’s Attorney General for fraud and theft. Most recently, in 2016, operating as AAAA Teva, they were banned from ever performing electronics repair in this state again. Their current stores are run by the former president of that company, the son of the former owner.  

We told both the Boulder District Attorney and the Colorado Attorney General that those operations had followed us into Boulder. Since then, we hear from upset customers nearly every week. Recently we handed both offices several hundred pages of documentation, customer information redacted. Just yesterday a customer picked up a machine they’d taken to them first. They’d been charged $300 to replace a part that, as far as we could tell, didn’t need replacing to begin with and had NOT been replaced. We saw no indication the machine had been opened, the part appeared to be the original, and the machine still didn’t work. We diagnosed and repaired the real problem for $160. There are almost always other machines in our stores that were recently in theirs, either not fixed at all or written off as unrepairable after a hefty diagnostic fee. To date, we have received no substantive response from the Boulder DA or Attorney General’s office.  

We’ve competed against honest businesses for years successfully. Arvada and Fort Collins prove it. What we couldn’t do was compete on a level field here. We pick some of these customers up after the fact, but we have to wonder how many walk away from that first experience with them never knowing anything was wrong, or assuming everyone in our trade works that way.   

We expected this fight, honestly, though we badly underestimated how long they’d be allowed to operate this way without anyone stepping in. Had this been the only problem, I think we’d have made it.  

But here’s the second. In the past, Boulder had four profitable vacuum and sewing stores at once, so the city can clearly support shops like ours. There are over 40,000 households inside the city limits alone, which works out to more than 100,000 vacuums in use and roughly 15,000 sold a year, and that’s before sewing machine, lamp or KitchenAid repairs we do. Our share of all that is a fraction of a percent.  

You know we can often fix a machine for less than a new one costs, sometimes for free, and that what we sell lasts longer and runs better, however neighbors don’t seem to. Which is not for lack of trying. We’ve spent about 10% of this store’s revenue on advertising, and you couldn’t think about vacuums without Vacuums R Us Boulder turning up on Google. You talked us up everywhere too, Nextdoor, Reddit, Facebook, there was no stopping word of mouth. However, when your neighbors did come in, what they said to us made the problem clear. Our claim to fame was free diagnostic on the spot. When someone brings in a machine, most of the time we can take it apart right there, figure out the actual problem, and tell them something like “You need a belt, I can put it on for free, it’s $6.” More often than we could believe the answer was “Oh, what’s the part number, I think it’s a couple bucks cheaper on Amazon.” They would let us do the work of finding the problem then save a couple of bucks buying it from Bezos. That exchange is a daily event here but an anomaly in Fort Collins and Arvada. The math in those stores echoes exactly what your neighbors say out loud.  

These two problems we might have survived. The third, both human and financial, grew worse every year. Everyone blames Boulder rents, and ours here is double Arvada’s, but so is the average income, and our landlord isn’t one of the two villains people complain about. They’re a private person. Real estate isn’t what’s killing us.  

Labor is. Not the wages, which run high in all our stores because good people are worth it. It’s that we have to overstaff Boulder. In our other stores, when we’re helping someone and another customer comes in, they wait a moment while we finish. Not here. People interrupt after a few seconds, walk behind the counter and into rooms marked employees only to dig through stock, and more often than not just leave after under a minute. Retail comes in waves, and we’re good at moving fast when it’s busy, but fast wasn’t enough. Instant was the expectation, so we overstaffed, which meant higher costs and a lot of wasted time during slow periods.  

And then there’s the harder reason. Your neighbors are assholes. We didn’t see it at first. During our opening week, people kept thanking us just for being there, and that gratitude never stopped, and it’s part of why we fought so hard to stay. But around year two, as the pandemic eased, the bad interactions climbed, in frequency and in cruelty. We work retail, our skin is thick, every town has its Karens in every shape, not just the meme. The disrespect our team takes here on a near-daily basis still stuns us. One manufacturer refused to sell us a repair part, and we caught a scathing one-star review for it. In 2022, we closed at 4pm the day before Thanksgiving, which was posted online, on our phone message and Google. We came back to a four-page handwritten letter taped to the door saying we’d ruined someone’s holiday by closing early. We had to invent code phrases for when a customer wouldn’t accept a technical answer from a woman on staff and needed a man to repeat it back, which was its own dark comedy, since we’re woman-owned and the owner herself routinely had to send out a male employee to confirm she knew what she was talking about.  

People aren’t built to be degraded by strangers day after day, and our Boulder team burned out fast. Service slipped, mental health slipped, so we acted. No one works more than three of five days here, rotating to the normal stores the rest of the week. In 2022 we added a program that pays staff directly for therapy, and we built a buddy system so people rarely work the floor alone, because even on a dead day the grind of being mistreated with no one there to lean on wears people down. Every week upper management is reviewing showroom footage, issuing refunds, ending customer relationships, and consoling someone a “customer” chewed up. These are the same people who staff our other stores without any of this. It isn’t an employee problem. It’s your neighbors.  

In 2023, as the pandemic economy cooled, revenue fell here while the costs above climbed. That’s the year Boulder stopped being profitable, and it started destabilizing the whole company, with our other stores essentially paying Boulder’s bills. By 2025 we were in real trouble and we went looking for outside investors. A few were interested, but cash poured in just to keep a losing location alive isn’t something investors line up for. We’re not quitters, so we dug in. We cut every expense except employee wages, added new revenue streams, leaned hard on technology to work faster, and ownership committed to 65-hour weeks without a raise until we got back in the black. It wasn’t enough. We are still in the red in Boulder. Carrying it any longer only drags down what we can offer Arvada and Fort Collins, and that isn’t fair to those communities or to our team.  

If you’ve read this far, it’s pretty clear how personal this is for all of us. We tried so damn hard, and we are truly sorry. This store was a wild chapter in the history of VRU, and for all the bitterness, we refuse to forget the moments of real humanity we shared with you in our little vacuum and sewing shop.  

I’ll end with this, because I think it sums up Boulder for us. Every year we plant little flower gardens around the store, and out back we keep an herb and vegetable bed the whole team tends and eats from. It grounds us, and gives us a few moments of peace in the day. For the last couple of years, people have come by in the middle of the night and torn the flowers out and thrown them on the ground. You can imagine how that felt. This spring, before we’d had a chance to weed and plant, someone came by in the middle of the night, weeded our planters, and filled them with flowers. Thank you for reminding us why we were here. Thank you for reminding us there’s good. We’re taking those planters to our other stores this month, and whoever you are, we will never forget you.  

But seriously, if you need something, come buy it now so we don’t have to move it.  

From the team of Vacuums R Us & Sewing Too