Emeralds to Coconuts, a hip little store with a funny name, offers women's fashions for young and old. While you won't necessarily find the latest trends here, you will find rack after rack of fun and stylish women's clothing, many of the items imported from faraway lands. Even the clearance rack at Emeralds to Coconuts has a lot to offer, such as a sequined rayon skirt from India remarkably priced at $18. And that's just one example. The incense-scented store also offers a variety of jewelry, accessories and gift items. But possibly the best part about shopping at Emeralds to Coconuts is the friendly service and welcoming atmosphere. No snotty salesgirls here. They even provide a complimentary gift bag and colored tissue paper for your gift items. And on one visit, there were free chocolates at the checkout counter. Could this shopping experience be any better?
Used to be this place had the market cornered--back before Borders stocked its walls with DVDs, back before Fry's ordered imports and sold them for cutout prices (maybe they just don't know what they have, but we do). With Movie Trading Company on the verge of selling out to Blockbuster--haven't heard otherwise, at least since we ran a news item on the proposed buyout--our love for this homegrown chain might diminish; we fear the corporate mentality, since we work for one ourselves. But till then, we love the MTC for three reasons: the nice-price used copies, which sell for several bucks cheaper than new discs; the neighborhood favorites section, always a blast at the Oak Lawn location; and the way you can rent before owning, without Blockbuster's late fees hanging over your head.
We picked up an old friend at the airport recently. She married a high roller and moved from Dallas to Las Vegas. She's all tall and tan, strolling out of D-FW International Airport, sparkling with stunning silver jewelry, carrying a Louis Vuitton train case, with a Gucci bag hanging from her shoulder. "You look great!" we cried, then pointed to a particularly swell bangle bracelet on her right wrist. "Sam Moon, $7," she said, and she wouldn't start the evening's drinking or eating without a quick trip to Dallas' best import/knock-off store. Sam Moon recently moved to the new Sam Moon Center and filled up two big store-fronts with luggage, jewelry, purses and gift-y tchotchkes. We've never seen better--or cheaper--silver earrings, bracelets; better or cheaper watches; better or cheaper fake designer purses. We've never spent so much time and so little money for so much crap. Good crap.
Ask Robert anything. That's really all you need to know, but for the sake of being informative ourselves, we'll keep going. Pickerings will tell you what to plant and where, they'll design your flower bed and even plant it for you. They lay stones, landscape and guarantee their gorgeous assortment of plants. Need tools? Got 'em. Need decorative details? Got 'em. Need moral support because you suck at gardening and can even cause lucky bamboo to die? They'll give it to you. Pickerings has everything you need to get going in the garden, and you'll have a green thumb before you know it. But fair warning: They have a gift section that takes excessive willpower to get through without blowing your wad on a leaded stained-glass piece or an old metal horse feed bucket.
We'll never go digital; uploading JPGs to a hard drive is nowhere near as satisfying as going into a darkroom and losing yourself for hours in the magic of photo developing. Though Warehouse does offer prints and enlargements from digital files, the majority of products and services cater to film users. We can supply our 35mm, medium format and Polaroid cameras here with all the film we could ever want--we can even pick up a few cartridges of Super 8 for those retro home movies we love making. They also carry accessories, papers, chemicals and other nifty items like liquid emulsion, which allows you to make any surface--a brick, a plate, a cardboard box--into a photographic surface. All in all, you could outfit a modest photo studio and darkroom in one trip to Warehouse. So, whether you aspire to be the next Penn/Avedon/Leibovitz, or just enjoy shooting rolls of your dog in full military uniform, Warehouse Photographic has the hookup.