News Photo by Julie Goldberg Alpena High School junior Anna Young practices folding T-shirts at the Alpena High School Campus Closet on Monday. Campus Closet is the AHS school store where people can buy Wildcat apparel.

ALPENA — Alpena High School students are able to gain real-world experience by working at Campus Closet, the AHS school store.

Campus Closet is where people can buy any Wildcat apparel, like sweatshirts, T-shirts, sweatpants, shorts, and more, along with lots of different items.

“You can get team shirts and those are like your sport shirts,” senior Brooke Gersewski said. “We have all the sports, clubs, and band and choir.”

Students in the Advanced Marketing class help run the store after taking Marketing the year before. Teacher Melissa Timmreck said Campus Closet is the Advanced Marketing class’s working lab and where students practice things they’ve learned.

“It’s to simulate a real-world retail environment,” Timmreck said.

“The students are one week in the store, running the store, helping to keep the store clean, and putting signs up with clearance items and different types of things,” Gersewski said.

The students learn everything about the business, including being a cashier, folding T-shirts and how to use the helium tank properly for balloons.

“We switch around,” Gersewski said. “Some people do some folding so everything looks good and restocking and that kind of thing.”

Gersewski said there are 10 students in the store at a time and the students rotate shifts.

Gersewski has been a part of Campus Closet for a few years and said she’s learned good work experience and how to work with customers.

“I learned all about marketing, what you need to run a store, how to order stuff, communicating with companies, and different types of things to help your store keep successful,” she said.

New this year to Campus Closet is the style of the cash registers. Every student can now get behind the cash register and be able to run the registers.

“It’s more of better spacing so we can have more than one employee back here and then we got a lot of new apparel this year so that we can improve our stock,” Gersewski said. “We have more employees, so that’s really helpful so we don’t have to be really stressed about making sure we get everything done.”

The Advanced Marketing class grew from six kids last year to 20 students this year. Timmreck said having 20 students this year will help the students learn more.

“I just think they enjoy learning the basics when they’re in regular marketing and then now that they can apply those things and learn even more, they just find it’s useful when getting another job, being able to list it on their resume, and just build work experience,” Timmreck said.

The store is open any day that school is in session from 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. There will be some hours after school and apparel is also sold at the home football games. People can enter the store by going to the back oval on Garden Street and entering through the side door.

Julie Goldberg can be reached at jgoldberg@thealpenanews.com or 989-358-5688.