Joie de Vivre Bag Spotted in New York Times!

The Joie blogger is a former New Yorker and faithfully reads the Sunday New York Times - Sunday just does not feel like Sunday without it.  And though neither your blogger or Joie de Vivre itself could really be described as "fashionable" we found one of our products in the Style Section - Bill Cunningham's "On the Street" column yesterday. Well... "our" product - which we got from a great little company called Hi-di-hi.  Pretty exciting to think that without even trying - we are cutting edge - at least for a minute or two.  We'll leave it to you to guess which product is ours - click on the photo to enlarge!

The Sadness of the Discontinued Item - continued

Here at Joie de Vivre, we kind of pride ourselves on trying to make people happy.  Ironically, we often wind up making them unhappy years later, when they return for another one of an item they have loved for years and we have to tell them that "you can't get there from here" - i.e. the item has been discontinued.  And we must stress, items are not discontinued because they are not popular - at least not here.  Often these items are among our most popular - but there are lots of different reasons why items cease to be.  Anyway, just yesterday I received a query from someone who sent a picture - "see the frog prince by the smoothie?"  (rather wonderfully question!)  And I looked - and saw a little fuzzy articulated frog prince that I had completely forgotten about - and that we probably haven't been able to get for ten or fifteen years.  It's good to know he's still living the good life, beloved and posing by smoothies.  But I had to break the bad "discontinued" news.  So, for those of you who have shopped here for years - perhaps you'll recognize this little prince and enjoy a small trip down memory lane.  And photo credit to the BuBBs - with our thanks!

One Itty Bitty Rubber Chicken

The title of this post was taken from the "for" line on the bottom of a personal check we received in the mail last week.  It was for $1.10 - sixty cents for one itty bitty rubber chicken and fifty cents for postage.  We mailed the chicken to Springfield, MA.  Anyway.  . ..  some might want to brag about their biggest sales - and a large sale is always kind of thrilling.  But today, we want to brag about our smallest sale.  We probably should have asked the customer to just put a dollar bill in an envelope because the cost of depositing a check probably just about cancels out our small profit on a sixty cent item.  We just might keep that check instead of depositing it.  So we didn't make any money on the deal - we like being the kind of store where one can purchase one itty bitty chicken!