Gift Show !

Joie de Blog is at the New York Gift Show, walking the 12 miles of aisles (so they say) to find wonderful new items "the better to delight you with." One of the things we love most about this particular show is the wide range of items and prices we see - here are two items, one of which, due to price, you won't be seeing at the store - and one that you will - (feel free to guess which is which) Illuminated Sign: $600. Small Felt Mouse - $12. Happily most of the things we have found fall easily into the affordable price range. Now, must finish coffee and head back to show!

Joie Product Spotted in New York Times!!

We were perusing the real estate section today - don't ask us why - these things just happen - and read an article about open houses.  The author was speaking of people finding items that made them uncomfortable when they opened a closet or medicine cabinet for a better look, and wound up that section of the piece with this:  "Likewise, all the nice prep work inside the apartment doesn’t prevent a bad impression from being made by other tenants of the building. At an apartment I saw in Brooklyn, the downstairs neighbor had a doormat that read 'Come Back With a Warrant.' I didn’t."  Okay - we sell that doormat here at Joie de Vivre - and we think it's very funny.  How anyone could think that it gives a serious bad impression  is kind of beyond us!   Too bad the people in the next apartment didn't have the Witness Protection one!

Joie Wants to Know !

Why would you change a perfect item?  We have been selling the Penguin Race for over 25 years.  There are some who don't like its incessantly (relentlessly?) cheerful chirping sound but we have come to accept and, yes, love it.

It's a rather inexpensive toy that inspires paroxysms of delight in small children, and shrieks of "I had that when I was a kid, I loved it!" in twenty year olds.  We've bought it from different distributors over the years,  and seen slight variations in box design and graphics, but the actual item has remained the same - until now.  I just ordered a dozen from one of our regular Penguin Race suppliers and they had not only a different look but a very different sound - the cheerful chirping replaced by more of an electronic fuzzy noise.  When I called to ask why, I was told that the supplier had decided to go with a cheaper factory, and that so far, no one seemed to mind.  But - never fear - we will sell only the original here at Joie de Vivre. And suppliers of inferior products take note - we say to the Penguin Race - we love you, you're perfect, don't change!

We Interrupt This Blog . . .

for a week while we admire the waves and beaches of the New Jersey Shore.  And we're not just admiring them  - we're swimming in them, walking on them, and doing all kinds of other things  here.  When you live in Massachusetts and tell people you're going to the Jersey Shore on vacation,  people look at you kind of funny. Like - why would you go there?  But take it from us - many parts of the Jersey Shore are not only Snooki free but absolutely beautiful.  We will resume our regular blogcasts next week at the latest !

Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control

We just received a letter of apology from one of our suppliers, a company called Mr. Christmas.  They were writing to tell us that one of the items we had ordered for the holidays would not be produced, explaining that one of the factories in China who makes goods for them unexpectedly closed, due to "financial obstacles."  They said that they were trying to understand what had happened, then went on to add that the factory owner was allegedly kidnapped, they lost the deposits they had made on their orders, and the massive molds for several of the products had disappeared.  Yikes !  I think we can accept their  "sincere apologies" and believe their last sentence "we hope you will understand that this was not in our control."

Picking Up Stars

We here at Joie de Vivre tend toward the philosophy that things will last forever.  Staplers, microwaves, cardboard boxes (and we've had some of those that hung around a decade or more), hot water heaters, air conditioners, paint jobs, displays, rugs, and super expensive signage.  It's a jolt to realize that in fact, almost everything eventually wears out.  Even things that don't really get picked up and used- like, for example,  super expensive signs.  Yesterday morning there was a small pile of debris on the sidewalk outside.  It looked like garden mulch but a quick check of our little storefront garden revealed nothing amiss.  (We get the occasional late night plant puller outer.)  And then I saw the star lying on the ground.  The star that had been affixed to the upper right hand side of our store sign.  (look at picture to right in blog) Completely water logged and shredding, it literally falling apart further under my fingers. And then I remembered the guy I hired to tack up a piece of the sign last fall telling me that the whole thing would need to be replaced.  I had conveniently put it right out of my mind.  Anyway, just want to warn you long time customers that in the next few months, (as soon as we figure out our new design) if you come to Joie, our sign won't look the same - but it will still be us !

Do My Eyes Deceive Me?

A customer who collects Josh Simpson planets was in at the beginning of the summer.  She has a fair amount and wanted to look at every single one we had - some several dozen.  She spent quite a fair amount of time, scrutinizing them and bought a few, promising to return to see if we had received any new ones.  She came in yesterday, and asked if we had any new ones in the back.  I felt guilty, as I had hinted we would probably get another order, and we had not yet reordered.  But I confessed.  "No, nothing new," I told her.  Her response - "but, you have new ones out on display!"  I told her she had seen them before.  She asked to see the ones from the stockroom - and marveled that there were numerous ones that she didn't remember.  That's actually a complement to the richness of these little environments - they are so multi-faceted, that depending on what part of the surface one particularly notices, you might not remember it if held at a different place.  But it's also telling in that our memories are never quite as reliable as we think!  Something we saw two months ago can seem like an entirely different thing.  Not always - but - just saying . . .  it's interesting!

If Grownups Wrote Like Kids

I was reading over a new book we got in this week - P.S. I hate it here - children's letters home from camp. They're slighty heartbreaking at times, but almost always very funny.  And one thing really strikes me about them, the way a kid will bounce from subject to subject with no idea how it reads.  "I hate it here, I hate it here, please pick me up, please please please.  We had really good brownies for dessert last night" - might be one example.  Or the kid who details a list of disasters from bug bites to getting beaned in the soccer game to scraping both knees - next sentence "I'm fine."   Imagine an adult writing in that style - "I was in a terrible accident today,  I was thinking of something else, and went right through a stop sign.  I hit someone but thank God no one was hurt.  I just found the best color of nail polish!  Moonshell pink!" or maybe - "My cat died yesterday. I've had him for so long - over 15 years, I'm really going to miss him so much.  Johnny Depp is getting divorced!"  It would seem downright peculiar for an adult to write that way, but kids do it all the time.  I have my grade and junior high school diaries as proof.  And P.S - I survived both camp and junior high.

Really? in 2012?

I was looking at a Toy catalogue the other day - needed to reorder something.  I don't order a lot from this company because it really is mostly aimed at kids, in a way that we don't aim at Joie - we like things that appeal to both kids and adults.  In any case, I hadn't looked through this catalogue at length before, and was taken aback to see their science kits divided into two separate sections for boys and girls. In the girls section:   snowflake factory, lip balm lab, bath bomb factory, Luxury Soap Science Lab, Beautiful Blob Slime Lab, Perfect Perfume Factory and Magic Crystal Oasis.  Boys get:  Volcano Crater Lab, Spooky Ice Planet Lab, Weird Slime Lab, Hyperlauncher Rocket Ball, Practical Joke Soap Laboratory, and Wild Physics and Cool Chemistry.  Pictures of girly girls on the girl's boxes and pictures of intent young male scientists on the boys.  Really?  After all we've been through?  To be fair, the girls kits did advertise "learn about the structure and changes of properties of matter, mixtures and solutions and chemical reactions."  They are not entirely fluff.  And I believe that most boys are probably not interested in making the perfect perfume or luxury soap.  But why exclude girls from Wild Physics and Cool Chemistry?  And what kid wouldn't be intrigued by a Spooky Ice Planet Lab?  Is it 2012 or 1952 here?  I don't think that boys and girls are exactly the same by any means - but I think these divisions are just plain silly.  And I think they are bad news for girls.

Zen of Retail

Every morning when I open the store, I walk around checking all the displays, straightening the cards, making sure the wind-up toys are facing the right direction, etc.  This morning, I picked up the large pin screen and pushed my face into it, and thought to myself: 28 years and I'm still pushing my face into the pinscreen.  Retail often requires us to do the same things over and over.  And over.  I don't think we've actually sold pinscreens for the entire 28 years - but probably close to 25.  At 365 days in a year, that's 9,125 days.  And some of those days we were closed.And some of them I was on vacation, or didn't open the store myself.  And some of them we were out of stock on large pinscreens.  Still, conservatively speaking, I would guess I have captured my likeness in pins at least 5 or 6 thousand times.  That's kind of a lot.  And I'm not done yet!

Resolved !

Someone who used to work for me moved to New York years ago, and to support her dance career, wound up working at Pottery Barn.  She didn't last long, partly because management required the staff to do and say specific things routinely to customers.  Okay, "Welcome to Pottery Barn" isn't that bad, but what really rankled her was the "add on sales."  If a customer approached with a mug, she had to ask if they wanted a coffee maker to go with it - that sort of thing.  We dismissed this as corporate annoyingness, and she wound up happy at The Enchanted Forest, a wonderful independent store owned by a friend of mine.  But lately, I've been noticing more and more of this in the small businesses I patronize.  Approach the counter with one bottle of wine and you're asked "Can I get you anything else?"  I bought an iced coffee this morning, brought it to the counter of a small gourmet shop and was asked the equivalent of "is that all?"  Yes - that's all I want.  It just seems so clear that the powers that be have instructed sales staff to say this.  If I wanted something else, I would ask for it.  Do they think I'm going to say - oh yes, I forgot - I want a bottle of your most expensive Scotch, that special cheese flown in from a small village in Italy - or a picnic for 6?  It's a small thing, but the more I hear it, the more it's started to bother me. I hereby resolve that we will not say that here at Joie de Vivre.

Another Birthday

Tomorrow is July 4th, a once inviolate holiday when a retailer wouldn't consider opening, even for a second.  But things change, and now almost all the "majors" i.e. big big stores, are open.  This produces a little anxiety in we smaller stores, and several neighboring merchants have asked me if we're going to be open, then breathed a sigh of relief when I said no.  I've done the same. And I was in a local speciality food shop a few days ago - I thought the cashier, who I know, asked me if I was doing anything for the 4th, and I said nothing much, just hang out with friends and enjoy having a day off.  She then said "they wanted to open here, but the staff revolted," and I realized she had actually asked me if we would be open. I don't think anyone wants to go back to the Blue Law days . . . .  but sometimes it's just really nice not to have the choice to go shopping.  It might seem a little frustrating initially - but to me, a holiday seems more peaceful and relaxing - more like a holiday - when not much is open.  See you on July 5th!  and Happy Birthday America.