Wockenfuss Candies is losing its post office

You tell yourself you’re not going in for the sweets, just to mail a package. But step inside the candy store and the warm, sugary smells emanating from the production line are hard to resist. Oh, why not pick up a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, or maybe some fudge?

That’s how things often seem to go at Wockenfuss Candies on Harford Road. “Seventy-five percent of our customers are post office customers first and shop candy on the way out,” said co-owner Jennifer Wockenfuss Waters.

Since it opened in 2011, the Parkville-area branch of the more than century-old chocolate company has operated its own little post office, where customers can mail letters, buy stamps and do almost anything they could at a regular U.S. Postal Service outpost.

But that’s about to change.

USPS notified the chocolate store’s owners that it will close the contract postal unit, or CPU, this month. The shop will stay open after the postal counter closes June 26.

Almost no one is happy about the decision, least of all the owners.

“This is greatly going to affect our business,” said Waters, who is among the fourth generation of Wockenfusses to run the company, known for its almond bark and nonpareils.

For Baltimoreans, it means saying goodbye to a quirky and convenient community staple: the chocolate shop with the post office inside.

“This poor post office, I’m so mad,” said customer Kim Nelson, a former Wockenfuss employee herself, after stopping in to mail some packages. “No matter how many people are in line, they treat you like the only person,” she said of the staff, who are employed by the candy shop but trained by the postal service.

The U.S. Postal Service has long contracted with outside businesses to run post offices like the one inside the Harford Road chocolate shop. In the Baltimore area, there’s another inside Drug City Pharmacy, and Wockenfuss also operates a contract postal unit at its West Ocean City location. There appear to be just a handful of candy stores with these postal units in the country, including one in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, and another in Texas.

The closure of Wockenfuss’ Baltimore post office is part of a larger trend. Last year, the shutdown of a longtime contract postal unit in California and another in Georgia prompted lawmakers to propose legislation to force the postal service to justify its decisions.

But contract units have been closing faster than they open for many years, said Steve Hutkins, who tracks their operations through his website Save the Post Office. Such facilities have also been a source of frustration for the union representing postal workers, which argues that they threaten postal workers’ retail jobs.

Waters says she doesn’t fully understand the decision to close the candy shop’s CPU, which she was informed about during a visit from a postal service manager. She reached out to elected officials and tried to appeal, but was denied.

Mark Lawrence, strategic communications specialist for the postal service, said in an emailed statement that the postal service “determined that nearby Post Offices are available to serve the community.” That includes the Parkville Post Office, just over a mile away from Wockenfuss Candies.

But that’s not good enough for Nelson, who relies heavily on the Wockenfuss counter for her personal business, an Etsy store selling crocheted accessories. (Her top sellers are chicken hats, ranging in sizes from infant to adult.)

While Nelson lives close to the Parkville post office, she said service there can be impersonal and unreliable. “I’ve had packages misrouted,” she said. In contrast, the workers at Wockenfuss “take care of your stuff.”

Customers can also use the post office any time the shop is open: 9 a.m.- 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and Sundays during the holiday season, too. That’s later than at many traditional post offices in the area, which also close for lunch. “We have a ton of Amazon and eBay customers,” Waters said. “They bring the packages here.”

Waters runs the business with her two sisters, carrying on a family legacy instilled in them by their “no-nonsense” grandmother Marian Wockenfuss, who died in 2024 at age 98.

The closure of the post office is the latest challenge for the Baltimore chocolate business, which Waters’ great-grandfather started in the city’s public markets 111 years ago. Wockenfuss recently closed its retail branch inside Towson Town Center, part of a wave of departures for the Baltimore County mall.

While cocoa prices have stabilized from a few years ago, the small business faces other high costs for raw materials and wages. “When you’re competing with Dunkin’ and Walmart … all of the costs are challenging,” she said.

Waters said she’s not just concerned about a decline in sales at her Harford Road shop, which also houses the business’s sole manufacturing facility for its six retail locations. She worries that the drop in traffic will make the area feel less safe, too. “The constant presence of people is good for the neighborhood,” she said.

Without packages to mail, Baltimore customers will need to admit one thing: They just need some candy.