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YOU CAN?T GET VERY FAR ON A DIME ANYMORE. IT?S RARE EVEN TO COME ACROSS A PAY PHONE OR A PARKING meter where your smallest coin buys any time. Harder still is finding a place where a dime still pays for goods, and good fun: the traditional five-and-dime. For small towns and neighborhoods across America, these "variety" stores used to be problem solvers, pantry stockers, and indoor playgrounds. In some places (fewer and fewer) they still are. |
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new venture would succeed, Vidler and his family declined to attach their name to it, calling it instead the Fair Store, until 1946. The present, thirty-year-old Vidler's sign is faihful to the dime-store genre, with puffy gold lettering on a cherry-red background. Just inside the front door stands the original upright scale and fortune-telling machine, which, after all these years, still asks only a penny for its thoughts. While grown-ups invest a cent for the answers to such weighty questions as "What is my main talent?" children cadge dimes for a lope on Sandy the mechanical horse or a paper bag of popcorn from the fifties dispenser. Vidler's waves its patriotic spirit with flags flapping out front - always the Stars and Stripes teamed with the Canadian maple leaf (a nod to neighbors up the road), sometimes joined by the Union Jack or the New York State flag, depending on who is visiting East Aurora. As he has done for years, Ed Vidler (Robert's son and, with his brother Bob and other relatives, current co-proprietor) raises the flags every |
windows whenever they need it, and sweeps the floors of the store's long aisles? Holy smoke,? he says, "I've probably swept five hundred miles of floor over the last fifty years." On the Fourth of July, Vidler's goes all out, stringing banners and bunting between the upper-story windows and sponsoring both a drill team and the K-POW (Kiddie Parade on Wheels), which rolls down Main Street. True to the old-fashioned nature of their business, the Vidlers aren't sure exactly how many thousands of items (costing up to $50) they have in stock, though they can tell you how many suppliers they deal with: more than seven hundred, an amazing figure for a single store in a village of only six thousand people. Inventory is for tax and insurance purposes, not ordering, which is sight-driven. "We will look at a counter and notice, hey, we're out of merchandise," says Ed. "That's when we know to restock." As for customers' queries, Ed likes to say, "If I don't know the answer, I can always make up a good one!" Kidding aside, who really could keep track of all the beads and bindings in the crafts section, the buttons and thread in the sewing section, the cookie cutters in the housewares section, the peds and hairnets in the personal-notion section, and the sew-on badges in the Girl Scouts section? Ed knows the answer: "The girls," that's who. The Vidler's staff to thirty-five mostly women - some of whom have worked in the store a quarter-century or longer - are conversant in the cane language of widgets, whatchamacallits, and thingamabobs, right down to the bobbin you need for Mother's 1953 Singer sewing machine or the one-and-a-quarter-inch-wide wick for the kerosene lamp in Uncle Harry's cabin up at the lake. The repair-don't-replace pragmatism of the Depression era hangs tough here. It's reassuring to spot StaZ-ON stove paste, window-screen patches, rubber crutch tip, and even mercury-glass replacement thermos liners. The staff knows its multigenerational clientele nearly as well as it knows its diverse merchandise, and the law of supply and demand obviously prevails. "We may have an atmosphere that leads you to believe we could reach behind the counter and pull out a buggy whip," says Ed, "but we keep up with the times. If someone's grandchild in another part of the country is busy trading a toy that hasn't yet been seen in these parts, we'll track it down." |
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