Click on a category or scroll down the page to read about this year's winners for Seattle's best stores and services...
(Item 60, Best place to buy Y2K rations, can be found in the best of the Millennium.)
Bellevue Square (Bellevue Wy NE between NE Fourth and NE Eighth, Bellevue, 425-454-8096) is a dominating retail presence that offers all the comforts, conveniences, and high-end shops you and your credit-card company could hope for. Urban vitality? Who gives a rat's ass; it still offers the most convenient Nordy's, not to mention a roofed, secure, and climate-controlled power-shopping paradise. Think of it as consumerism's Biosphere. Other malls that maneuvered well enough to end up in the top three were the new jewel in the consumer's crown, Pacific Place, in second place, followed by the newly refurbished and raring-to-go University Village.
With product names such as 2nd Day Hair, Dirty Boy-Dirty Girl, and Hard Up, you could easily surmise that the products made by Vain (2222 Second, 441-3441) won't be stocked at the hoity-toity salon on the corner any time soon. The products, which are designed by punk-rock hair guru Victoria Thomas Gentry, purposely give their users a messed-up look as well as provide your neighborhood punk rocker with an alternative to sticking egg in his hair to get the perfect mohawk. Vain succeeds where others in the beauty industry fail: By not taking itself so seriously, Vain takes hair design more seriously than the rest. The second tier of vote-getters was dominated by biggie national companies with local boutiques, such as Aveda (second place) and the Body Shop (third).
It was probably their cool sign with the cartoon elephants that rocketed them to victory, but Elephant Car Wash won the battle of the animals, besting Brown Bear Car Wash in a tough battle. Score one for the little guy—the Elephant has just five locations (including a gig spiffing up shoppers' autos at the Supermall of the Great Northwest), while there are 19 Brown Bears to choose from. Third place went to the folks who get out the hose and wash their car at home. Don't forget to wash behind your mirrors. . . .
There is nothing quite as passionate—and quite as irrational—as our attachment to the One True Thrift Store. When we say "best" or "favorite" on this one, we mean it—there is no close second, or even second-best. There is the One True Store and a bunch of pretenders. Our readers are most passionate in greatest numbers about Value Village (various locations), which attracted nearly double the votes for all other competitors combined. The thrift giant has been gobbling up market share faster than Microsoft, and has somehow managed to avoid alienating most of the known universe the way Bill Gates has. Somehow, the chain has ingeniously combined the real value of a thrift store with a retail chain's competitive and expansionist drive, but has preserved the cachet of a thrift—that particular feel somewhere between business and philanthropy. Maybe it's that word "village"—Value Monster or Value Chain, somehow, wouldn't have the same humble ring. Goodwill swept into second, followed by Red Light Clothing Exchange in the U District and the closely pursuant Buffalo Exchange.
THINGS THEY LIKE
Rebecca Latsios
Cofounder, Scarecrow Video
What I really love about this place is that there are no rules. Not just written rules. A lot of places, no matter what you want to do, it's like, No, you can't do that. Don't even think about it. Whereas here, you want to do something, people may think it's great or they may think it stinks, but it wouldn't occur to them to say you can't do it. It's the wildness: not just the wildness of the environment, but that it seeps into people's personalities. You know another thing I love? The day before the Fourth of July, the whole country is buying fireworks and setting off fireworks or getting ready to set off fireworks, and I come out of my house to go to the store and there's a double rainbow over Lake Washington. So I go, There's no way I'm going to the store, so I drive down to Magnuson Park and there are about 50 cars there. Just looking at the rainbow.
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Scarecrow Video (5030 Roosevelt Wy NE, 524-8554) founder George Latsios was battling cancer while assembling what director Bernardo Bertolucci called "the best video store in the world." Perhaps feeling he had little to lose, Latsios fell behind in his taxes along the way; as he began to make a remarkable recovery, he and his wife/partner Rebecca had to face an unhappy IRS. To resolve their debt, they decided to sell the business. But while George was in Greece visiting his ailing father, the US District Attorney called Rebecca and informed her that Scarecrow's new owner had been convicted of embezzling close to a million dollars from HUD and, by purchasing Scarecrow, was in violation of his parole. But now everything seems to have come to a Hollywood ending: The debt is all but eliminated, George has almost fully recovered, and Scarecrow's two new owners—Carl Tostevin and John Dauphiny—have kept George and Rebecca on as consultants. Was it all worth it? For film fans, a long saunter through the aisles of Scarecrow Video, featuring over 36,000 titles, will result in a resounding "Yes!" The new owners are upgrading the computer system (bringing around 8,000 more titles into circulation) and putting in new carpeting, for which the employees seem grateful. Beyond that, George happily reports, "They're like me—little kids in their own candy store." If you don't live near Scarecrow, there's always our second- and third-place winners, Hollywood Video and the mammoth Blockbuster.
