Harley Hooper

During college I worked in a retail store.  After graduation, many of my friends went into the management track at the big department stores.  I decided to take the speciality route because it seemed to have more of a "business" aspect.

Those of us who went this way are becoming a lost breed.  The "mom and pop" stores are dying out or getting bought up by the megastores.  Young people today can't afford to stock a full speciality store.  Many of them open stores with smaller, more specialized inventories such as a 'shirt' shop or a 'jeans' shop.

We're of the old school trying to keep up with the new world of computers and Internet shopping.  We're doing that by having a brick and mortar building with a good inventory and adapting to the computer age by developing our website and eventually adding regular 'on-line' shopping.

My passion for this job lies in the comments we get from our friends and customers who often come in and go, "Wow!"

Every season we keep achieving something that is a little better than the last season.  Many times our customers say, "I can't even find this in major cities."  Yesterday we had a customer visiting from Indiana who said, "I live in a city of 300,000 people and we have nothing like this store.  This is the coolest store I've ever seen."

Comments like that are what keep me striving to be the best!