With the closing of Cato Fashions in Albert Lea Saturday, many area women are having to look elsewhere to find affordable, fashionable clothes.

The store in Albert Lea, which carried girls, junior/miss and plus sizes, was the only Cato location in Minnesota.

“We recently made the difficult decision to close the Cato Fashions store in Albert Lea because it was not meeting our performance expectations and had declining sales volume,” said John Cato, president and CEO of the company, in a statement.

He said the business regularly reviews all of its stores for performance and growth potential, and it is working to relocate store associates to neighboring stores, as possible.

The store operated in a strip mall to the south of Wal-Mart. After the closure, the closest Cato store will be in Des Moines.

Carly Solland, a frequent customer of the store, said she was disappointed at the closure.

“That breaks my heart,” Solland said.

For a while she used to visit Cato three to four times a month.

In fact, she said, it used to be a Friday ritual for her to go in and see the new products the company had out. The store truck would come on Wednesdays and the employees would have all of the new items out by Fridays.

Solland said she loved that the store had stylish clothes for all sizes, even larger women.

Melonie Miller, a former Cato employee from February 2006 through January of 2007, said there were several things she appreciated about the Cato corporation.

First, she said, she appreciated that on Sundays the store wouldn’t open until the afternoon to allow its staff the time to go to church if they desired.

Also, if there were clothes that didn’t sell, they would get donated to a local charity.

“I really enjoyed working there and shopping there,” Miller said.

The employees and managers were phenomenal people, who were always so helpful to their customers, she said. It was evident they liked their job.

“I really hope and pray that someone in their store in the community will find those girls and offer them jobs,” Miller said. “Because they’re awesome.”

They were only given a few weeks notice before the store closed.

The closure of Cato comes just a short while after another of Albert Lea’s businesses — Starbucks — closed its doors. And on Friday news broke that Albert Lea’s Bath & Body Works would close this month, too.

“I don’t know what prompted Cato, but it is tough economic times,” said Randy Kehr, executive director of the Albert Lea-Freeborn County Chamber of Commerce. “I think companies make decisions based on issues that we sometimes don’t even have control over.”

The cost of doing business continues to go up, and with the economy going the way it is, prices can’t go up accordingly, Kehr said. What people sometimes don’t remember is that that every time prices go up for the homeowner, they go up for the business owner, too.

He encouraged people to support local businesses, especially those that give back to the community.

That’s the simple and greatest thing we can do for our local businesses,” Kehr said.

According to the Cato Web site, there are more than 1,100 Cato stores across 32 states.