At some point recently, the indispensable Cobble Hill notions and sundries store Winn Discount changed its name, and its sign, to Winn Home & Beauty. Thankfully, they have retained the general design spirit of the old sign, even if the "Winn" is a bit more fancy and curvy now. Otherwise, the change is, I feel, unfortunate. "Winn Discount" was easy to say. The name had a lovely assonance to it. It fell trippingly off the tongue, as in "I'm going to the Winn Discount." No one's going to say, "I'm going to the Winn Home and Beauty." I suspect the neighborhood will continue to call it Winn Discount.
I always say "Winn Discount has everything!" because when you're looking for some random item, they always seem to have it. I guess now I'll have to say, "Winn Home & Beauty has almost everything"?
ReplyDeleteI always just called it Winn's
ReplyDeleteThey probably get a cease-and-desist letter from Winn Dixie.
ReplyDeleteI was in there the other day and it seemed to me that their prices were pretty high.
ReplyDeleteI think it's because the prices aren't always really that low there.
ReplyDeletei never really felt that there were discounts to be had at Winn
ReplyDeleteOK, so the general feeling is the Winn Discount was only ever "Discount" in name.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times places like this will have a few dozen items each week that are really good deals. These used to be known as "loss leaders". The idea was that you have a few things you're willing to take a loss on in order to bring people into the store, where you hope they'll buy some other goods at regular price along with the specials. Looking at the photo, the prices in the window look pretty low. I mean, 2 standard pillows for $10 is $5 a pillow. In any case I'm not sure I'd even want to sleep on, say, a 99 cent pillow because I'd wonder what the heck is this thing really made of? On the other hand, if what you're after isn't one of the "special deals" then yeah, I can see where prices might be high, so maybe calling the entire store "Discount" is a little "Disingenuous", sort of the way WalMart used to use the tag line "the lowest price" in all their ads, until it turned out that only a relatively small number of items were really "the lowest" (see, loss leader marketing again) and so they changed to "low prices" and put the emphasis on continual price rollbacks.
ReplyDeleteIts a great store. You can't find anything without the help of the native guide posted by the door. But whatever you need, they have.
ReplyDeleteI needed some glass vases a few years ago, and Winn's had a number of them in different styles - thick, greenish glass, made in Spain. They were around $7 each. Long live Winn's whatever-they-want-to-call-it.
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