Northeast corner of the square, since 2011
This page is not a list of what is in the shop. It is a list of the nine reasons people actually come in, what is on the shelf for each one, and what it costs.
The index
Prices are what things actually cost here, not a range wide enough to be useless. Where it says ready now, it means there is something on the shelf today that will do, wrapped, in under ten minutes.
The rule from twenty years of these: one good thing beats a basket of small ones, and the thing most likely to be used is the least exciting. Hand thrown mugs from a potter in Hardin, a boxed set of decent black pens, or a heavy tote that will survive a school year. Not another candle. They already have eleven candles.
$14 to $38Ready now. Twelve to twenty of these go out the door in the last week of term, so come before Wednesday.
Couples register here on paper, in a book by the till, which sounds quaint and works better than it should for a town this size: the aunt who does not shop online can still see what is left. For a shower rather than the wedding itself, the safe answer is something for the kitchen that they would not buy themselves, which in practice means the good wooden board or the enamel roaster.
$25 to $120Ring first. If they are registered we will tell you what is still unclaimed before you drive in.
A rack of four hundred cards exists because of the fifteen minutes somebody spends in front of it, and the two categories that carry the shop are the two nobody plans for: sympathy, and blank inside. A drugstore stocks eight sympathy cards and six of them are the wrong register for somebody you actually knew.
Cards are $4 to $9. If you cannot decide, say who it is for and roughly what happened, and you will be handed three.
The honest advice is that nothing from a shop is the point, and the thing that helps is showing up. What travels well with you: a sympathy card that does not sound like a greetings company wrote it, and something practical for a kitchen with too many people in it. Paper plates are a better gift than flowers on the second day and everyone is too polite to say so.
$4 to $45Ready now. Wrapped plainly, no ribbon, and the card left unsealed so you can write it in the car.
Clothes are a trap because everybody buys newborn and nobody buys nine month. So: a cotton blanket, a hardback picture book, or the wooden rattle from the same Hardin potter's husband, who makes about forty a year and cannot be persuaded to make more. If you do buy clothes, buy them for next spring.
$18 to $52Ready now.
The hostess gift is the easiest errand in the shop and the one people most often skip. Something that gets used up is right and something that has to be displayed is wrong. Local honey, a bag of coffee from the roaster in Excelsior Springs, a tin of the good salt. Under twenty dollars, and it should not need a vase.
$9 to $24Ready now. Ninety seconds at the counter, including the ribbon.
Roughly two thirds of what is in here is made inside an hour's drive: the pottery in Hardin, the candles in Lexington, the soap in Orrick, jam and honey from three farms in the county. That is not a marketing position, it is what a shop this size can actually buy in quantities under a hundred.
The other third is bought at market in Kansas City twice a year, and it is the third that keeps the lights on in February.
This is the errand where people overspend and still get it wrong. A group is usually better off putting the money into one substantial thing than into a card everybody signs and a gift nobody chose. The board with the initial cut into it, the heavy stoneware pitcher, the framed print of the courthouse from the 1911 photograph. Engraving on wood is done here and takes two days.
$45 to $180Two days for engraving. Everything else the same afternoon.
Usually a father, usually in June. What works is consumable and specific: the hot sauce made in Richmond, a pound of coffee ground how he takes it, a decent pocket knife that will get used and lost. What does not work is anything that has to sit somewhere in his house and remind him you spent money.
$12 to $65Ready now.
The one errand where a photograph beats an object. The framed courthouse print and the two aerial prints of the square are here for this, and so is the small run of prints a woman in Lawson makes of the grain elevator. People buy these for their children who moved to Colorado. It is the most reliable seller in the shop and it took us four years to notice.
$32 to $95Ready now, framed. Unframed and rolled for posting if it is going a long way.
Say so at the door. There is a shelf behind the counter that exists entirely for this and it is stocked on the assumption that somebody will need it before noon. Nothing on it is over forty dollars, everything on it wraps in one sheet, and none of it looks like it was chosen in a hurry.
$18 to $40Under ten minutes, card written, wrapped, out the door.
The counter
Anybody can order the same stoneware pitcher to their door in two days. What is on this side of the counter and not on a website is somebody who knows the house it is going to, has met the person, and will tell you plainly that it is the wrong gift.
Finding us
Angled parking directly outside, and the two spaces on the corner are almost always free because everyone assumes they are not. If the door is heavy, it is. Push harder.
Describe who it is for and what the occasion is. You will get two or three suggestions and a straight answer about whether we have it, which is more than an inventory page can do.