May is and has always been our slowest month of the year (hence the vacation). I'm 4 hours into my shift and the only person I've seen is the FedEx guy and Lori over at Comfort Cuisine next door (great food).
So, you get an extra meandering blog post for May. Maybe this will become an annual tradition.
We're back from our vacation and boy did we pack it in. We saw 4 new states, 4 new toy stores, and about 15 new cities. I'll cover that after I tell you what's new.
We'd halted orders in the weeks leading up to the trip, but some backorders trickled in...
- Nee-Doh's Nice Cube Glow released. It's a glow-in-the-dark Nice Cube
- A new set of Nature Pocket ID books released
- We got a large shipment of books, including some great sticker and temp tattoo books
- As I was writing this post we received a re-stock of Penguin Dash and Nee-Doh Gummy Bears
- We now carry S'Noodles. A fun craft with colored packing peanut pieces you can stick together.
We're working on a bunch of orders: including some great Made in the USA novelties, more books, and hopefully some more dolls. I also want to expand our STEM section and give the axe to some of the corporate licensed stuff.
All right, our trip. In order of us visiting them, big love to the cities of...
- Columbia, MO - Bustling downtown, Mizzou is a beautiful campus
- Kansas City, MO/KS - State Line & 39th was a cool spot. Is that the Midtown Neighborhood? Idk. I'm not an expert, but that is the spot to stop.
- Lawrence, KS - Another bustling downtown. Spent way too much time there.
- Wilson, KS - Came for the 'World's Largest Czech Egg', stayed a while due to its charm. There's smaller Czech Eggs throughout the town, there's a great independent grocery store, a restaurant, and several working phone booths. Friendly friendly people. Any similar-sized Small, Midwest, Farm Country, USA town should take notes.
- Hayes, KS - Good food, great natural history museum, Arcade 11 was super fun.
- Limon, CO - What a windy city. PinBowl had a phenomenal pinball selection in perfect working condition (including 4 EM's, if, like me, you're into that sort of thing).
- Loveland, CO - My god. Food, parks, shopping, mountains. What a city. Don't move there though, it would upset the 10 remaining native Loveland-ites. I'm baffled how over-populated the Denver-Fort Collins area is.
- Lexington, NE - Pulled into the downtown on a whim. Ended up hitting 3 Guatemalan and 3 Somalian shops in quick succession. A big regret of the trip was not knowing about this town in advance. I could have spent a whole day here.
- St. Joseph, MO - Reminds me of the town where I went to college. A hollowed-out downtown with a bunch of bars, and a never-ending sea of corporate sprawl. Glore Psychiatric Museum was awesome. Regretfully didn't have time to visit the Chase Candy Shoppe.
- We visited other cities, but, they don't get "Big Love" from me.
Special shout out to all three floors of "The Toy Store" in Lawrence, Kansas. What a massive store. It's always a joy to talk to other people in the industry, but I think I could have spent 10 more hours with the owners. The store has been at it for 45+ years too, so we learned a whole lot from them. If you're in Lawrence or Topeka it's a must-visit.
A special anti-shout-out to the town of Marceline, MO. Y'all could milk that 'Disney's Boyhood Home' stuff for all it's worth, but you are squandering it. Disney's sons donated a ride to your city (unprecedented) and y'all don't do anything with it. What's up with the train cars in the park? Y'all put ladders leading up to them like, "Come hither for fun, children", and then you walk up to it and it says "NO CLIMBING". Y'all are no fun.
But really, I'm just mad because I drove off my route to visit the downtown toy store to find it was permanently closed. Bummer. Tiny toy stores in sub-1000 population towns are hard to come by.
Also, to all of y'all who told me Kansas was a boring state to drive through, I couldn't disagree more.
~David