"One of the things that make for vitality in any city ... is the trinity of big buildings, bright lights and weird stores ... By weird stores one means not simply small stores, mom-and-pop operations, but stores in which a peculiar and even obsessive entrepreneur caters to a peculiar and even obsessive taste. (Art galleries and modestly ambitious restaurants are weird stores by definition ...) If the big buildings and bright signs reflect the city's vitality and density, weird stores refract it; they imply that the city is so varied that someone can make a mundane living from one tiny obsessive thing."
A riddle wrapped in a tongue-twister: What is the most common form of culture that cultural consumers consume? Is it television? (Ratings are down.) Music? (CD sales are down.) Movies? (Eighteen-month box-office slump.) Even if ratings and sales and box-office figures were sky-high, none of these kinds of cultural exchange would be as central to our day-to-day lives as the simple act of shopping, or window-shopping, or driving by shops and thinking, Look at those shops! The honest-to-goodness bricks-and-mortar retail experience defines our cities, and our culture, and, to an uncomfortable extent, ourselves.
When that experience becomes standardized, we exchange a bit of cultural diversity for the comforts of the familiar and dependable. This, of course, is the crux of the whole, hackneyed Starbucks debate—lovable branch office or evil corner-consuming megalith? But perhaps there's room enough in our cities for both the dependable and the dependably odd. Even the full might of Wal-Martization—the most powerful force in economic natural selection—can't quite send mankind's pesky small-business gene to extinction. As long as there are rents that passionate people can afford, passionate people will open stores that reflect their passions. These stores, weird stores, are the unsung heroes of urban life—deliverers of service, generators of civic energy, preventers of strip-mall decay. The question is, do we have enough of them here in the Valley, and, if we don't, where do we need them?
When we think of weird stores, our minds flash to a place that is clearly not here: a long, urban avenue with multistory buildings—on the bottom floor is the gyro shop, above it, trumpet repair, above that, Crazy Aunt Ella yelling down at the trumpet repairman. We may, so they say, be Manhattanizing Las Vegas, but, because Las Vegas is Las Vegas, it will never be Manhattan, and Crazy Aunt Ella lives in a gated apartment complex near The Lakes. Nevertheless, in a city absurdly efficient at creating retail space, we have a secret weapon in building our very own indispensable supply of urban shopping oddities: strip malls. Specifically, marginally troubled strip malls. Weird stores should find fertile ground where not-so-weird stores have failed to thrive. Note to landowners: If the high-rent tenants have abandoned your shop fronts, maybe it's time to lower the rent and let the oddballs in.
Here, then, are three case studies of shopping centers in the southeast part of the Valley, centers that started life with high hopes, suffered through a wave or two of shop closures, and which now are being saved, or might be saved, or desperately need to be saved by the arrival of the weird store.
One
In the late 1990s, when builders set themselves to transforming the dusty lots of South Eastern Avenue into a sort of merchant's paradise, one of the first big projects they finished was Colonnade Square. Today, at Eastern and Pebble, the Colonnade occupies one of the best retail corners in town and fills it wisely, with a big, modern multiplex and the popular, stylish Roadrunner Casino & Saloon. At the same time, little more than half a decade has seen a surprising number of businesses close at the center, particularly along the back row of pads, next to the theater. Jitters coffeehouse came and went, Bonjour, a French restaurant, opted to move across the street, a few ice-cream shops have appeared and quickly disappeared, a record store rose and fell, then the clothing store that took its place. All this reshuffling created an opportunity for the arrival of weird stores, and today the Colonnade is a sort of Easter egg in reverse, ordinary on the outside but colorful within.
Three doors from the theater you'll find Windy City Sports, a collectibles shop. Now, some sports collectibles joints belong to big national chains and reside in places like the Forum Shops and hardly qualify as weird stores, but Windy City is an independent: Any place that is closed on a weekday afternoon with a sign in the window reading, "Sorry for the inconvenience. Obtaining autographs," is definitely the bailiwick of a good, old-fashioned obsessive, the sort of small businessman who gives a center—and a city—personality.
Next to Windy City is another spot, Island Desserts, that may or may not be weird—I couldn't get in—but has on its door one of the pleasantly imprecise postings in which weird stores seem to specialize: "To our customers: We will close for a short period of time for renovations." In any case, the spirit of independent-mindedness, if not outright weirdness, has caught on in the center (which, after all, was the former home of Cheese Boy Comics): There's The Pink Poodle Parlor Too and Kessler and Sons Music and The Hangout Billiards, Darts and Games. Here's a Natural Healing Clinic and there's the Exotic Candles and Body Works (coming soon!). And over this way, just a few steps from Roadrunner, is a store with a wonderful sign—one that reads simply, in confection-striped lettering, "Candy."
And then, right next to the theater, there is The Rock 'n' Java. The contents of this coffeehouse include: A bandstand for live music, a partial drum kit, a fully-stocked skate shop, a video arcade, a bookshelf that includes The Great Opera Stars in Historic Photographs, two pink vinyl couches and one red one, a checkers table, a trumpet-shaped candelabra, and a stand selling T-shirts with slogans like "Got Jesus?" and "Chosen." If the kids are telling you there's no place to go around here, they haven't stumbled across the Rock 'n' Java, a place seemingly cobbled together from the dreams of several artsy 15-year-olds. You look at a place like this, and first you say, "Weird." And then you say, "Good."
Once upon a time, Green Valley Town Center was, well, the center of a "town" called Green Valley. Long before Manhattanization, Town Center, at the intersection of Green Valley Parkway and Sunset, was the trophy project in the California-ization of the Valley, our very own little slice of San Diego, a handsome, curving, whitewashed place with fan palms and sheltered walkways and big-time businesses: a first-rate sports club, a well-appointed little amusement park called Mountasia, a Discovery Zone indoor playground, stylish California restaurants like Crocodile Café, a United Artists movie theater, a hipster clothing shop, an upscale card and trinket shop, a Wherehouse, a supersized Petco with a full wall of fish tanks, a casino-microbrewery, and a terrific courtyard with a play fountain that fired syncopated streams as its centerpiece. Families would start the day at the gym, go to lunch at Barley's or Café Sensations, take the kids to Mountasia or the Discovery Zone, come back for dinner at Crocodile Café and turn the little ones loose to play in the fountain. It was 1996, and life was good in Town Center.
Then, with tidal-wave sweep and efficiency, all the energy and a lot of the money in Green Valley was rolled southward, first toward Green Valley Ranch, then further, clear out of Green Valley, to Anthem. One by one, the businesses in Town Center began to close, because Town Center was no longer the center of town. Crocodile Café closed, had its place taken by Bagel Café, then Bagel Café closed, too. Relax the Back, a specialty furniture store, split for the vicinity of South Eastern and St. Rose. The record store, the pet store, the clothing shop—gone. The theater—dark. Mountasia simply disappeared. A shutdown amusement park is eerie; what's eerier is one that's been utterly erased, miniature golf hills and dells replaced by piles of blowing dust. Today, of the early anchor tenants, only the sports club (which is now, perhaps in honor of the area's reshuffled fortunes, called Club Sport) and Barley's Casino and Brewing Company remain. Other survivors include Café Sensations (which, technically, is in the adjacent Athenian Shops) and Toss, an Asian restaurant. Starbucks, too, endures, perhaps because there are always enough job interviews going on to fill all Starbucks, everywhere.
All this failure would be normal enough, dismaying but acceptable as one of the hazards of business, if most of the vacated spaces had been filled, but they have not. Today Town Center is a sort of postmodern gallery of emptiness, oddly compelling and, for those of us who remember its brief glory, sad.
But there is hope, and hope has a name—the Weird Store—and a harbinger: Psychic Eye Bookshop. While Psychic Eye is part of a chain, and therefore isn't quite the sort of homegrown oddity that can make a town truly funky, it is a sort of intermediate step to funkiness—a shop at which the old, triumphant Town Center would, one imagines, have turned up its nose. Anyplace with skeleton ashtrays ("Just look what you're doing to your body!") and a prominently displayed copy of Col. James Churchward's The Lost Continent of Mu can't help but stir the pot a bit. And in the absence of a major demographic shift, or a wrecking ball, the high-rent stores aren't coming back to these parts anytime soon. One way to reinvigorate the area is to bring in unusual, niche, and grassroots enterprise, the sort of things people dream up with a vision in the mind and a prayer on the lips.
First of all, this will require rents such businesses can afford. Second, it will require a bit of staying power on the part of the businesses themselves, while the community discovers a new kind of Town Center, and a new way to relate to it. Imagine art and foreign films, or perhaps even stage plays, in the old UA theater. Imagine little Mediterranean and Russian restaurant-markets, a general bookstore with some peculiar bent, a ballet studio, a fencing salle, a Finnish woodwork gallery, a place where some guy sells the stuff he's made from broken trombones. Imagine an impromptu arts district in the heart of Green Valley. Imagine whatever you want—just imagine: The thing, in building a city, in filling its emptied shells, in staving off blight, is never to stop imagining.
In the meantime, on, say, a Tuesday afternoon, you can wander from one empty window to the next, cupping your hands before the glass of an erstwhile Mexican restaurant and finding it too black inside to see, stopping before the doorway of the empty Wherehouse to look up at the CD-shaped silver awning, hung in happier times: "Track Number One: Green Valley. Henderson, Nevada. U.S.A." You can look at the empty rooftop above the empty Petco, where the statue of a gray tabby cat once stretched. You can look into the gutted grooming area and wonder what the next tenant, if there is a next, will do with this space. And then you can go to Barleys, and have a good lunch and go out into the courtyard and sit in the sun, utterly alone, summoning the ghosts of '96.
There is a more recent phase of Town Center, called Town Center III. It is a good-looking, two-story Lego kit of a building, an assemblage of right angles and earth-tone surfaces and second-floor walkways with teal railing. TC-III was built just a few years ago, maybe two football fields away from its predecessor. Between the two phases stands a big parking garage, built in the glory days of the original Town Center, a monument to unfulfilled expectations and, now, a big impediment to the establishment of any kind of synergy between the two Town Centers.
The new center has the air, more bewildered than offended, of a dandy who shows up for the party in tails only to find out the party has moved. By the time the center opened, the southward shift of dollars and buzz was a done deal, and shops started closing soon after they opened. Key anchor tenants remain—Sammy's Woodfired Pizza is still pleasing diners and Eden the Salon and Day Spa is still keeping folks in style—but you can't quite look past what once was the nicest toy store in town and now is approximately 7,584 square feet of emptiness, save the astronaut mural in the rear corner.
A second generation has begun moving into some of the units—though sometimes it's not until the third generation that salutary weirdness arrives. The Blue Wave Asian Buffet has given way, efficiently enough, to Buffet Asia. Not so weird. But here's a bit of hope: The void left by the closure of the nice, slightly odd Coffee Castle has given way to the nice, slightly odder Old Tyme Deli and Cigar Shop. Old Tyme is a family-run joint that opened just this week, with free food on day one (Boar's Head meats, Java Classics coffee, good bread) and constant, smiling attention from the kids in the family. On one side of the counter—a fridge full of Gatorade Ice; on the other, in the former Coffee Castle gift nook—a fully stocked humidor. When a boy in baggy shorts and unlaced shoes offers you bottled water while a life-sized cutout of a stogie-wielding George Burns peers over your shoulder, you know you've entered the zone of someone else's dreams. And in the world of shopping and eating, of wandering and discovering one's city, there's no better zone to be in.
WEIRD STORES |
Going Postal
Charleston Stamps
5708 W. Charleston Blvd.
877-1106
"If I were a collector, I'd be in trouble," laughs Ruth Hilliard, owner of Charleston Stamps on West Charleston near Jones. Hilliard has had her shop open for over 20 years, and in that time she's never been a stamp collector herself, although her ex-husband, with whom she started the shop, was. Hilliard's tiny shop, in a strip mall behind a 7-Eleven, is crammed with boxes, drawers and displays of stamps from around the world and throughout history. It has the cramped, homey feel of a well-stocked attic, and Hilliard herself looks like she could be an eccentric aunt who never throws anything away.
Hilliard's sole competitor died a few months ago, so Charleston Stamps is now the only store in town devoted exclusively to stamp- collecting. While Hilliard notes that on some days she may not have any customers, she says that other days business is brisk, and scoffs at the notion that it's hard to make ends meet in such a niche market. "I'm still here," she says simply.
On a Wednesday afternoon, the only customer is William Shoreboggs, who's been collecting stamps for 40 years and coming to Hilliard's store for between five and 10 (the two can't agree on how long). He estimates he spends four hours in the store every Wednesday, looking for stamps mainly from his favorite area for collecting, Mexico. Behind Shoreboggs is the auction board, with index cards tacked to a board for silent bidding on certain items. Asked if she sells on eBay, Hilliard responds with a simple "no." This is not a woman who embraces new technology, but stamp-collecting is a decidedly old-school pastime, best pursued in a cozy, welcoming environment with a kind overseer who will indulge your obsession, if not participate in it with you.
Heavenly Pursuit
The Angel Store
9326 W. Sahara Ave.
562-4901
On a completely different level of strange, The Angel Store on West Sahara grew from the love its very Catholic owners developed for the guardian angel rage that took the country by storm in the mid-'90s. If you were too young or not paying attention, ladies everywhere were pinning and giving tiny angels to each other to scare off those evil spirits that lurk everywhere and while reminding each other and their families that they are loved.
Before then, there were always collectors, but they had to search high and low for their angels. Since then, angel collectibles have become all the rage. Hence, The Angel Store.
Anyway, as you might expect, The Angel Store carries angels, lots and lots of angels. Angel lapel pins, charms, bracelets, ceramic ones, marble ones, paintings of angels and cherubs, Gabriel, Mary, Theresa—they're all in there. Thousands are in there. If you need an angel and can't find the right one at The Angel Store, you may need to re-evaluate your desire for an angel.
Don't be discouraged if the ladies who own the store are less than thrilled to help you out; like the angel energy they claim to sell through their offerings, they are very protective.
Bondage & Discipline
Paradise Electro Stimulations
1509 East Oakey Blvd.
562-4901
If there were a contest, PES (Paradise Electro Stimulations) The Studio would win the Wackiest Store in Las Vegas competition blindfolded and gagged with both hands bound behind its back. PES The Studio is a high-end boutique for the bondage and discipline crowd, with the added punch of also being home to all of Dante Amore's Erotic Electro Stimulation (EES) devices, including its very own "sexually innovative" electric chair.
Though this store lives in an unassuming strip center at the corner of Oakey Boulevard and Western Avenue, looky-loos are kept at bay with a somewhat intimidating entry procedure that is akin to checking in with your doctor for a visit. Customers sign in each visit then wait in a room that looks a lot like your dentist's office did in the mid-'70s: Beige couch. Non-descript carpet and walls. The only interesting thing in this dull, fluorescently lit waiting room is a framed mechanical drawing of Amore's electric chair, PES The Studio's most famous product, which comes standard with very few bells and whistles, but pieces can be added to enhance the experience as desire dictates.
Once the door to The Studio opens and customers are permitted to enter the black light-lit, smoke- filled retail chamber, they are surrounded by enough fetish wear and toys to satisfy even the most deviant imagination. The huge selection includes what many B&D types consider to be the very finest selection of plastic, vinyl and leather ensembles, sex toys and accessories available in the market. It includes Amore's entire line of EES toys. The centerpiece, of course, is The Chair, which looks more like a skeleton of a chair with highly polished, fat chrome pieces. Don't even ask for a test drive. Other than a touch with your hand, product demonstrations are strictly prohibited by law.
Where's The Beef?
Las Vegas Jerkys, Etc.
Plaza Hotel & Casino, third floor
1 S. Main St.
385-7991
Most people think beef jerky comes in one flavor: beef flavor. But a step over the threshold of Las Vegas Jerkys, Etc.—or even a peek through the window—is proof of just how wrong they are. There's teriyaki and sweet teriyaki; natural, peppered and smoked; and scallops, clams and shrimp. There's fruit-flavored and even hot fruit-flavored, in case your fruit-flavored beef jerky isn't spicy enough.
The store began 10 years ago on Fremont Street, and owners Harvey and Karen Higa are rightly proud of their business, now on the third floor of the Plaza Hotel & Casino. Walls and pillars covered in Polaroids of happy customers offer testament to their success, as if the massive array of jerkies—most driven by customer demand—wasn't enough. The Higas have even done well enough that aside from their own self-named brand and Karen's gourmet line of cookies and bagel chips (both non-jerky, thank you very much, as is their wide selection of candy), they also bought their outside supplier, Islander Brand, moving the company from California to Nevada. Coming soon will be jerky in the shape of playing-card suits and poker chips, not to mention a plan Harvey has of making business cards out of jerky.
It all begs the question: Who buys this stuff? "Ninety-nine percent of our customers are from Hawaii," says Harvey. Unfamiliar with the idea that jerky is so popular in Hawaii, Harvey explains that it isn't. "People take it back as gifts. It's all packaged for easy shipping." And of that high percentage, Harvey says the average age is 70. "So the jerky has to be soft," he says with an impish grin.
Martin Stein
Scandinavian Styles
11155 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. 130
Henderson
898-6996
Outside the door, there is a shelf full of clogs, and a sign: "Coming soon: Cowboy Clogs." Inside, there are ginger cookies and milk chocolate and pickled herring and carved wooden doodads and framed cityscapes of cities worthy of the suffix "-scape." On a wooden pole, lined up like beads on an abacus, there are large wheel-shaped sheets of hard crispbread. On a coffee table—several copies of the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, which apparently has a loyal, if not particularly wide, readership in town.
And then there's the owner, Hans Ahren, watching Monty Python's Flying Circus from behind the counter here at Scandinavian Styles, on the far southern reaches of South Eastern Avenue, not far from Anthem. Hans Ahren is, without a doubt, the only former Stockholm-based oil-shipping broker operating a Scandinavian gift shop in the foothills of Henderson's McCullough Range. Ahren, who is 47, has a wide, ready smile and a broad, bald head and the alert eyes and thick forearms of a man who's hammered out shipping deals with Nigerian oil merchants. Running a small business is tough, but Hans Ahren knows from tough.
Six years ago, after the big oil companies squeezed him from his niche brokering the transport of Black Sea oil, Ahren moved to the U.S. with his American wife, Connie. For a while, the couple lived in Colorado Springs. "I couldn't handle the altitude," says Ahren. "So we moved to Las Vegas. Now I can't handle the heat." Ahren did a bit of research. The Valley, he learned, was home to at least two Swedish clubs, WASA and SWEA, and a Norwegian one, Sons of Norway, and if you figure that for every Scandinavian club-joiner there must be at least a couple of non-joiners, that had to add up to a community that could support a store. "I thought of all these Scandinavians driving to California to get their chocolate and lingonberries at IKEA, and I decided we needed this place," says Ahren.
One thing Ahren's previous career taught him was how to deal with shipping and customs, and soon enough he had handicrafts direct from Scandinavia and foodstuffs via New York and Chicago and Minnesota. He sought out partnerships with Scandinavian stores in other states so they could split the freight costs on shipments from the old country. Meanwhile, he went to great lengths to find Scandinavian-style crawfish—keeping readers of the shop newsletter apprised of his progress all the while—and finally found a guy in Portland, Oregon, who'd hired fishermen to catch crawfish and a farmer to grow the Swedish-style dill with which to season it. "It was very popular," said Ahren. "I ordered 120 pounds and I've only got one or two packages left."
"I'd say 65 percent of our sales are food," he says. "And Viking things are big here in Vegas. I've sold out of almost all my Viking jewelry, and I'm getting a big order in. We do quite well before Renaissance Fair in October."
Several times a year, Ahren buys a one-day liquor license from the City of Henderson and throws a party in the store. At Christmastime, the store hosted a Santa Lucia party, in which the central figure is a lovely saint with candles in her hair. "It's a festival of light," Ahren says. "It gets pretty dark in Sweden in December. And it was kind of nice, because we had a power outage the night of the party. I had plenty of kerosene and lanterns, and we drank spiced wine, which is called glogg, and we had this beautiful Santa Lucia, a Swedish girl, who sang songs for us."
These have not been the easiest times for imported goods stores. "When I started the shop, the dollar was 35 percent stronger compared to Scandinavian currency than it is now," Ahren says. "So everything I buy is now 35 percent more expensive. I have to watch my inventory or I'm dead. The other day I put something up on ebay." Nonetheless, Ahren says, business is slowly picking up as both American shoppers (who like to use his lemonade mix for margaritas) and the widely dispersed Scandinavian community find out about the store. "People come from Boulder City, and from Summerlin," he says. "There are a lot of Scandinavians out by Nellis, women who married American airmen when they were based in Europe. People are finding out we exist, and they're starting to come.
"The other day an old Swede came in. He was 99 years old, and he had a cup of coffee and some ginger snaps and we talked about the old days. He hadn't been home in 55 years."
Mint Condition
Casey's Sportscards & Memorabilia
3421 E. Tropicana Ave
458-6394
It's not just that you can get, if you were so inclined, a Yogi Berra baseball card for $60; an autographed Mickey Mantle for $1,700, or a box of Wheaties with the flakes still inside and Mary Lou on the outside for—well, that's negotiable. It's that this business, junk on the back floor, incorrect change in the register, a bland storefront in an ugly strip mall, is owned and operated by Lana and Ron Kosinski, not because it makes any money, but because it's Ron's obsession.
"He's done this all of his life. He works a day job, but he loves this," Lana says. Casey's has been open for 17 years, and isn't the only card-trading store in town, but it may well be the only one in which the owner is described as "an organized mess."
Tempted as we were to buy the $299 framed, autographed picture of Brett Favre in his high-school football uniform, we realized this was a place for people of like minds: A kid, say waist-high, walked in and went straight up to Lana and said, "15 sheets please."
Sheets? Ah, cellophane sheets with pockets in them for his own budding card collection. May he open a similar store in 25 years.
Sex(y) Items Sell
Priscilla's
700 N. Rainbow Blvd
822-6861
On Rainbow Boulevard, between the Washington Avenue and the U.S. Highway 95 on-ramp and tucked into the northeast corner of a strip mall fronted by a Subway franchise is Priscilla's, a clothing store (it's licensed as such) steeped in sex. Or, more correctly, steeped in stuff related to sex. A recent ad touts "lingerie, exotic Kama Sutra products, spicy greeting cards and dancer discounts." Hint: These quote, unquote dancers aren't ballerinas.
When Priscilla's opened in May 2000, activists shouted to high heaven about opening a sexually- oriented business just yards away from school bus stops and in a shopping complex frequented by students wanting a sandwich or ice cream on the way home. Business owners threatened to move. Some neighbors feared explicit materials would litter sidewalks. Others worried about an influx of pedophiles and perverts.
The group, Pornography Only in Zones, sought to change a city code that labeled a business sexually oriented if it derived 51 percent of gross revenues from the sale of sex-related items to a lower threshold of "more than an incidental percentage." City officials initially denied Priscilla's business license application, prompting the Kansas City-based chain—yes, chain—to sue; miraculously, the license was later approved, much to the dismay of activists who claimed city officials, as they're often accused of doing, put business over families and that Priscilla's franchises would spread like vermin. (Rainbow is the company's only local store.)
When the Weekly phoned in, management wasn't available. From the looks of things, the neighborhood doesn't seem the worse for wear.
Read, or Hide
Academy of Fine Books
2026 E. Charleston Blvd.
471-6500
On a Friday afternoon, there's a French couple standing in what looks like a huge, overfilled closet full of books, and they're talking—in French—to some guy behind the half-buried-in-books register about a late-edition copy of an obscure book whose title we cannot make out. This, on East Charleston Boulevard, where outside a cop car goes by with lights and sirens, a man pushes a grocery cart full of blankets, and the grafitti is plentiful.
Academy of Fine Books is an obsessive's haunt, a good place to slip away into someone else's messy head: Here, there is a mysterious framed picture of Dan Quayle and a basket full of unused, decades-old postcards from such intriguing destinations as Missouri. Also for sale: WWII medals in a plastic display case; a lamp; and—books. Stacked high and low and in the floor, some with a library's telltale Dewey Decimal marking, old and older books are here for the touching, smelling, reading and buying. This is a place for a bookworm to spend an afternoon, or for anyone to dodge in for escape.
Fortune & Shampoo
Art Galleria Botanica
709 E. Fremont St.
366-0303
Odd stores in Las Vegas don't always have to contain a luck element, but it helps when they do, right? Take East Fremont Street's Art Galleria Botanica, a hidden gem that is dedicated to its customer's unfailing good fortune, a challenging retail territory to be sure. Its logo even acts as a directive: "Change your luck, change your life."
It's like 7-Eleven gone voodoo. Not only will you find spell books and incense, you'll find a huge selection of candles so you can make good with the holy trinity and all the Catholic saints along with the African gods. You may also find some candles to burn that will improve your sexual prowess and appeal, along with good luck-enhancing and bad luck-discouraging sprays, spell books and talismans. Best of all, a spiritual advisor is on hand to help navigate your luck and the store's stock.
If the metaphysical merchandise does not appeal to you, it also sells items for day-to-day street survival such as socks, razors, soap and shampoo.