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.

They Say It's Your Birthday

Today is the 28th birthday of Joie de Vivre, and it happens to be cosmically aligned with the day we opened - the 28th falls on the same day of the week, Thursday, which happens only 4 times every 28 years. We've decided to celebrate by having a little 5 to 8 champagne - seeing as we opened that first day at exactly 5 pm.  Funny to think back: we had no computer, no fax machine, the word "blog" was unknown,  and no one ever looked down at a small glowing screen while they were in the store.  Joie de Vivre looked kind of like an art gallery, an item here, an item there,  it was quite spare.  Life has changed a lot.  But, many things do remain the same - and we've been selling some of the same items for the whole 28 years - Pustefix bubbles, kaleidoscopes, the dancing magnetic ballerina.  And we're still sitting behind the same desk, happy to talk to you, help you choose a present, gift wrap it and send you on your way. These days some of our customers come to us via the internet and we ship all over the world.  But we still like doing business the old fashioned way right here in Cambridge.  Thanks to our customers wherever they are, whether they remember the opening day itself, or whether they came in for the first time last week!  Cheers!

Trend Alert !

A young woman was in the other day, browsing our card racks.  After laughing what I believe is called "immoderately" at one of them she came up to the desk, smart phone in hand.  "Is it okay if I take a picture of a card?" she asked. Surprised, I said okay.  "I want to send it to my sister," she added, "it's really perfect for her."
Part of me thought - how sweet - she knows her sister will like this card,  and my next thought was - ten years ago she would have bought the card.  Of course losing a sale for 2.95 is not that big of a deal, but somehow I felt it was a harbinger of the future.  Taking pictures of cards and emailing them is the new buying and sending them?
I fear this is not a trend that bodes well for the greeting card industry!

Happy Father's Day and Small Apology

Joie de Blog has always had a horror of not blogging.  One of our pet peeves is going to a website of any sort, clicking on the "read our blog!" button, and finding that the most recent entry dates back a couple of years.  We try to post at least twice a week.  But sometimes life intervenes, in the form of spectacular weather, a chance to go to Vermont, and the blog is temporarily forgotten.  And we feel bad about that.  However,  we are deciding that blogging once a week is the new blogging twice a week - at least some of the time.  So, apologies, and here we are again, on Father's Day 2012.  It always strikes us how different Father's Day is from Mother's Day.  The week before Mother's Day is much busier, and this is universally true - florists tell me that Mother's Day is bigger than their second most important day of the year, Valentine's Day, and Father's Day provides a tiny bump at best.  The one thing they have in common that we enjoy here at Joie de Vivre, is the young child shopping with the other parent, and trying to pick out a gift for their mom or dad.  It's really cute to see kids trying to convince one parent that what the other parent would really really like is - a small toy truck or car - or glowing fairy.  Eventually they get the hang of it of course, and it's also fun to see kids thoughtfully choosing a gift for their mom or dad.  We're about to open and ready to help - choose - wrap - whatever.  Happy Father's Day to all our customer dads !

Jane Jacobs vs Marc Jacobs

In an interesting article on Mom and Pop shops in New York's Greenwich Village published in the NYTimes magazine today, I learned what kind of business Joie de Vivre is.  It's a "lifestyle" business.   One merchant interviewed after thirty years in business said, "we're not richer or poorer.  we're about the same."  Writer's comment - "and this didn't bother him." I understand that way of thinking.  Don't want to get bigger, bigger, bigger.  But that's not all the article talks about - it's worth a read - interesting piece that resonated with me - (with a crazy long link - there's probably a better way to do this!  Anyway,  here it is:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/magazine/can-mom-and-pop-shops-survive-extreme-gentrification.html?ref=itstheeconomy

Fun with Displays

What can I say . . . .  sometimes I just get an idea that makes me smile . . ..  (not that the notebook on its own didn't do that!)