A photo of our tiny Glenwood Avenue store, circa 1998?. Lots of old friends in this one, and there, in the middle is Miss Heidi back when she was just a fabulous customer. Now she's a fabulous Panopolie staff member! Wow, Heidi, we DO go way back!
We still sell those Chinese Festival of the Moon lanterns. I love the way they shimmer in low light (like moonlight) and have several hanging at my home.
This is Kathryn walking away from my persistent photo-ing. Actually, I was taking a picture of the space behind our narrow counter...always way too messy for my taste but it worked. Those tiny pink chairs in the background sat at a tiny table and we had a big box of plastic animals and cars that we sold for a penny a gram. Children would pick out the perfect orange plastic snake and we'd weigh it and ring them up. Then mom would bring up her iolite briollettes and we'd weigh those, too! Jennifer B remembers bringing her kiddos in to play at the table and I am pretty sure they bought a snake or dinosaur from us!
The back wall of the store was painted a bright mustard yellow, a color I still love. That is Sierra at the counter.
Those bead shelves on the wall are still in use at our current store. Remember, I never throw anything out. Looking at these photos I recall we had no slatwall (which is retail geek-speak and maybe meaningless to you!) but that's the wall board with the grooves for pegs. How did we manage to cram so much stuff in that tiny store?
Oh, yeah, we hung strands over the counter.
Those pink chairs? My girlies are too big for them now, so the chairs have returned to Ornamentea. Look for a tiny table, soon, and maybe even a box of penny-a-gram animals.
I am going through actual boxes of real photos taken in the days before digital cameras. It is amazing how many bad shots you take when you don't have a delete button or a view screen to preview the images. If you or anyone you know is featured in this edition of Way Back Then, please contact me so I can annotate the names correctly!
