July 1, it’s only been a few months. We’re very new.
People are really excited about it. Chinook is such a small town, so they’re really excited that we’re trying to bring business into it and grow the town and all that, and people are loving the atmosphere and the ambiance.
We do rent out to dealers, so it’s not all ours. But also I’ve been collecting since I was a little girl. We have the store next door, the Chinook Country store, and it shares the same drain field and when we bought that I told my boyfriend, ‘If that house ever comes up for sale we should totally grab it, make it into an antique store,’ and I was kind of halfway joking but not at the same time. It came up for sale a year later — like 10 months later or something like that — and we were like, ‘We should jump on that,’ because I have stuff, I mean, my house is full, my garage is full, I have a storage unit because I love to find treasures and stuff, but then I don’t have an outlet. So now I have the outlet so now I can keep doing it because otherwise we were going crazy. We had to get rid of some stuff. So I have a ton of stuff already and then we go to garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. Actually, by word of mouth we’ve had several people ask us if we want to buy stuff from them and I’ve bought three storage units, and we’ve bought a shed from someone, and there’s another lady who wants us to go through her whole garage and just buy the whole thing, which is a lot of work. Sometimes there’s not always a lot of great stuff, so there’s a lot of weeding through.
Yes and no. I bought a storage unit — my very first storage unit — I bought it for $10. It was really cheap and there was barely anything in there, it was like, canned food and you could see most of it was garbage, but in the back I could see an old bomber jacket. So I was like, ‘That’s worth $10, I’ll bid $10 on that.’ The other person bid $5, so I bid $10.
It was really cool because I went through this and it was a local lady who had just passed away. I’m one of those weird people that, when I find people’s belongings, I want to find out more about them and find out where it came from. So I found it and it was a local lady in Seaview, and I couldn’t figure it out, and I kept going through her stuff and then I found out that her first husband died tragically back in the ‘40s and then her new husband, who had also passed away, he was a famous tennis star. It was really cool. So the coolest part of the story was, I researched it and I found out where she worked, so I called them and they helped me, and I tracked down the family from the first husband in North Carolina and then I tracked down the family from the second husband and they lived in Astoria and I gave them all their belongings. It was really cool. The guy in North Carolina, he flew here to get all the stuff, because it was all pictures and marriage certificates, it was all paperwork. There weren’t a whole lot of items, except trophies. There were trophies from the second husband because he was a tennis star.
I still talk to the guy in North Carolina. He said that their family thought that all of that stuff was lost years ago. He couldn’t believe that I tracked them down and found them and so, the last time I talked to him he said he had it all on his table, everything was spread out and he was taking copies of everything and distributing it to the people in his family.
So it wasn’t something I kept, but it was really cool.
The man was a bomber, so he was in the plane taking pictures, so there’s these cool pictures that you would never see.
That’s a good question, and I don’t know how to answer it because I don’t know how I do it. I do every day by the day. We do have an awesome manager named Shantana and she’s worked for me for two and a half years and now she works at all three (stores), so wherever I need her she goes there. She works long hours, she just works whenever, all the time. She’s pretty awesome.
Tim has a full-time job that’s not any of our businesses, and he travels. He’s a grocery rep, so he travels. He comes home every night, but his territory is Longview all the way down to Lincoln City and then all the areas in between — Portland and Scappoose and all those things. So he travels every day and then comes home and so he leaves me with all of this stuff. It’s overwhelming. Plus, I have an 8-year-old, and [Tim] has two kids, so we have three kids. I don’t know how we do it.
My parents owned Pioneer Market and I grew up in it since I was born. It was Art’s Market and turned into Pioneer Market, then my dad got cancer a couple of years ago, so I bought it from him really quick. I had worked there already, I had managed it, ran it. We pretty much just changed names. Then, my boyfriend was actually my grocery rep. at my store, so we had known each other for five years already and we were super good friends. We definitely liked each other, but he lived in Portland. But then, (the Chinook Country Store) had been up for sale for a while and I had kind of joked about how he should buy it. One day I was like — because we were both single — ‘You should just move here. Just buy the store, move here and we can be together.’ And he was like, ‘Oh.’ That was his answer, he said ‘Oh,’ and then he leaves, and I went ‘Oh, no.’ I was like, ‘Did I say something wrong? Does he not feel the same way?’ I felt just awful. So the next week I took my dad on vacation and my mom and my son, because we thought my dad beat cancer, which he hasn’t, but we thought he did. That was his bucket list, and I was like, ‘We’re going to go to Alaska, a cruise.’ I took him on a cruise, I didn’t have any reception or anything. We were finally at the end of the trip and I had a little bit of reception — not very much — and he calls me. I had texted him ‘Hey, I hope you’re having a great day,’ because I hadn’t gotten to talk to him and we’d left with him just saying ‘Oh.’ So then he calls me and he’s like, ‘Hey, wish me luck,’ and I was like, ‘Why?’ and he was like ‘Oh, I’m going to go talk to Ed and Jackie and make an offer on the store.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I might need a place to live for a while.’ And then the phone clicked out, so I couldn’t talk to him anymore about it. It was awful, and I still had three or four more days of the trip, so I had no idea what happened.
So then he bought that, and it pretty much runs itself, so Shantana, my manager we hired her mom and sister, who also work there.
The antique store — I love antiques, I love to shop for them. I don’t like shopping, at all, but I love garage sales and I love looking for that treasure for a really good price. It’s almost like a disease.
(Having multiple businesses) wasn’t really in the plans. It just kind of fell into place.
No, because the stuff I really like stays at my house. I love collecting toys, old Disney stuff — not Mickey Mouse, but Disney. I like old Disney stuff and old toys and anything from my childhood so all that stuff is still at my house. I’ve only bought one thing (from the store) which is really good for me, because I love all this stuff.
The best part is I get to see it. So, since I get to see it everyday, I don’t really have to buy it and take it home because I get to see it anyway.
I think what sets us apart is our ambiance. Almost every antique store you go to, it’s just an antique mall. It’s just a building that they’ve put stuff in and, for us, we thought that we wanted to draw people in for the ambiance as well as the antiques. I think our ambiance definitely sets us apart, but we’re smaller and it’s in Chinook so we’re the only one.
We did really good. We had a grand opening in the middle of July, and that was really good for us. We put it on Facebook and we put it in the paper and we had a big turnout, we had a lot of people — it was a really good day. Other than that, this month has been pretty slow, but we changed our hours. Now I think we’re going to go back to being open every day but shorten our hours with it being winter, and then in the summer be open everyday and make our hours longer like we did this last summer. July and August were awesome, September wasn’t too bad, but October has been really slow.
We want to do a Black Friday (sale) or maybe just a weekend instead of actual Black Friday since everyone is busy on Black Friday, maybe we’ll do a weekend type thing instead. Then, we definitely want to do something for Christmas, maybe have a night where we stay open late and we have present wrapping. We haven’t decided yet, but we want to do something.
I love looking at all the stuff, so that’s my favorite for sure. It’s completely different than our stores. Our stores are convenience (stores), so people come in, you know everyone by name because you see them every day and they buy the same thing. But it’s also a ‘Hey, how’s your day?’ kind of thing, but it’s not long conversations and stuff like that. Here, you don’t really know anybody that comes in, unless it’s a local of course, but you get to talk to them for a long time, you get to find out where they’re from and what they’re up to. It’s a totally different atmosphere, it’s much slower whereas there it’s fast paced. You’re always stocking something, helping people, running out to pump gas. Here, it’s slow. They’re both great in different ways.
Probably because it’s slower, I like a fast pace. I like to stay busy. Not that I don’t stay busy, because I’m always moving stuff and cleaning stuff, but I’m not much for dusting. I’d rather be busy working. So it would be nice if it was busier. Other than that I love it.