What’s Your Store’s Plastic Straw? — Weekly Retail Tidbits #254

What’s Your Store’s Plastic Straw?

Wow. What a week in Atlanta for market. If you were there, you probably could catch the elevator faster and not feel like a sardine in the halls. There were not the usual number of shoppers at one of the 2 biggest gift markets of the year.

The move to June likely had a lot to do with it. The FIFA crowds starting to arrive in Atlanta toward the end of the week were fun to watch. (I love some good people-watching. 🥰)

But you shoppers who made the trip? Y’all were ready to buy. You were prepared. You knew what you needed to reorder — which left more time to check out all the new.

It was a fabulous week. Coming home, my brain was full. Full of new, full of pretty, full of all the things that my stores are going to rock in sales. At some point it hit me, the way an “ah-ha” always does after a big market: the question is never only what to add. It’s also what to stop.

A few years back, Marriott — yes, the folks behind the Ritz-Carlton — stopped putting a plastic straw in your drink. They didn’t ban them. They still have them. They just quit handing them out by default. The result? More than a billion straws a year, gone. And at the table, most people never even noticed.

That’s the part that stuck with me. The thing they stopped was a thing nobody missed.

The only time I miss a straw is when the server puts my glass down with his fingers on the rim. I would like to think Marriott trained their staff to add that extra care since they subtracted something else.

We don’t think that way very often. We’re wired to add — a new line, a new product, even expanding the store walls (sometimes all great). But the stores that feel best, the ones that feel like somewhere, are almost never the ones with the most stuff. They’re the ones with the nerve to take something away — and focus on doing what they have better.

Think of your store’s plastic straw. The thing you do every single time, out of habit, that nobody would miss if you stopped. The category that doesn’t sell well but you reorder anyway. The discount you run because you always have. The stuff that has piled up near the register trying to be that last add-on sale.

Market was a blast. In fact, Tango did just what I described. Our showroom has four new lines and lots of new products within all of our lines. But we did not just add. We subtracted first. We see the difference! You will, too, with your store — keeping all this in mind. 🤓

And here’s the fun part. There’s a darling new book from Compendium called I’m Not Doing That Anymore: A DIY Boundaries Manifesto. It’s a little fill-in manifesto of exactly this — all the things you’re finally giving yourself permission to quit — with fill-in-the-blank lines like “Just because I can ___ doesn’t mean I have to.” It’s an impulse buy that practically sells itself at the counter, and honestly, it’s this whole post in a gift book.

On the counter: I’m Not Doing That Anymore: A DIY Boundaries Manifesto, by M.H. Clark, illustrated by Jessica Phoenix (Compendium) · $15.95 retail, out January 2026.

Write yours down this week. One line. We’re not doing ___ anymore. Put the date on it. That’s the aha.

xoxo,
❤️ AmyFay

Call or text · 865-217-6790

This Week’s Tech Tip — The Email Address Test

A quick one, born from my own week of frustration. My emails kept bouncing back — blocked — from Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail addresses, and I couldn’t figure out why. So I asked my AI assistant to explain it like a person. The short version applies to every one of us:

Your email address is a first impression. It’s on every invoice, every order, every reply. @aol.com and @hotmail.com read as relics of the dial-up era. @yahoo.com isn’t far behind — and Yahoo and AOL are the strictest providers about blocking mail outright, which is exactly why mine kept bouncing. @gmail.com is fine, but for a business it still whispers “small.” Only your own domain — @yourshopname.com — says real, permanent business. It runs about seven dollars a month, and it’s becoming how Google and the AI assistants decide you’re legitimate.

If your shop’s email still ends in @yahoo.com, @aol.com, or @hotmail.com, let that be your one small project this month.

Read the full Tidbit — what each address really says about your shop →

2 Distinguishing Tidbits

Same idea as the straws, just on my shelves. A distinguishing little detail about two of my lines, the kind of thing you only notice once you know to look.

The erin gray difference

No faux pearls. No plastic beads. That’s the erin gray difference.

The LJ Sonder difference

Parker · LJ1580

Legacy · LJ1951

Here’s my favorite part: one of my stores cannot keep the Parker in stock. It looks so high-end that his shoppers keep buying it, so he keeps reordering it for them. The Legacy is one of my personal favorites.

It sells itself, over and over. New to Tango, easy to see why.

All Our Great Lines

A little reminder of everything else in the showroom — tap any one to flip through its catalog.

Cobblestone Living	Compendium
EvaBelle	FacePlant Dreams
Lenny and Eva	LINNEA
Bunnies by the Bay	Mary Lake Thompson
Meghan Browne	ORI London
The Winding Road	True South Puzzles
Whispering Willow

a tidbit more — your store has its own page now

If you had an appointment with me in Atlanta, you already know about this one. It was my little thank-you, the QR code I handed you. I built your store its own page online, made so that when a shopper asks Google or ChatGPT where to find these brands near them or in your town, it points them straight to your shop.

If we didn’t get to meet up this round, don’t worry. I’m working my way through the stores that keep my lines stocked and order consistently, building these pages out one at a time, and it gets faster every week. Keep a Tango line going strong with me and yours is on its way. This is exactly the kind of thing I love doing for the shops partnering with me. It is a human touch in a world pushing everyone to just click and reorder. Online makes plenty easy, no question — but there is still nothing like having a real person in your corner, the same way your shoppers lean on you.

Our 15 Tango lines — reply any time and I’ll get you whatever you need:

Bunnies by the Bay · Cobblestone Living · Compendium · erin gray · EvaBelle · FacePlant Dreams · Lenny and Eva · LINNEA · LJ Sonder · Mary Lake Thompson · Meghan Browne · ORI London · The Winding Road · True South Puzzles · Whispering Willow

Great to see y’all in the showroom. Happy summer! xoxo, ❤️ AmyFay

SHOP TANGO HERE

AmyFay Chandler

She reads all of this so you don’t have to. Based in Knoxville, TN, AmyFay is a wholesale sales rep for the brands she represents across Tennessee and Kentucky, and she oversees the D2C side for Sweet Tree Jewelry and Caroline B Cook — two of those brands — making sure brick-and-mortar retailers always come first. She writes Weekly Retail Tidbits (now in its 254th issue) because she’s living the same questions her retail customers are living, and figures things out alongside them. Her whole project: helping independent retailers stay human while the rest of the industry tries to automate them away.

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