Lucky You!
Lucky You! Is one of the great things to happen to the city of New Orleans Post-Katrina. The bright candy store was a lifelong dream for local resident Tiffany Wallace long before the storm, and her way of dealing with and trying to help the low spirits and moral of herself and the city was to tackle that dream once and for all.
I met Tiffany in a bar shortly after I arrived in New Orleans, she told me how she had spent years of her life working under business owners and thinking about how she would run a business if she had one, she was just always too scared to do it. Tiffany moved around living in different parts of the US and came back after Katrina to be with her family. New Orleans had always been home. “It’s the one place where – if we had a subway- I was to get off and come up from underground at any given intersection, I’d know exactly where I am and exactly which way was north, south, east and west, and know at least three people who lived within a two block radius. That’s how I know its home.”
Tiffany had always wanted to run her own store, and not too many people were investing or starting businesses in the years following the flood, but Tiffany thought that her dream candy store would be just the thing the neighborhood needed. A fun stop for all ages who are looking for something sweet, “an affordable old-style candy store, none of that expensive European stuff,” Tiffany told me just days before she opened. This was a place where you could get all the old fashioned penny store candy, candy by the piece, and candy that everyone could afford.
Lucky You! Is everything and more than Tiffany said it would be. The beautifully rainbow painted store is full of bins of old gumdrops, Gummi Bears, jelly belly’s, Mary Janes, soda bottles, mike & ike’s, Nerds, giant Jawbreakers and more. There are piñatas dangling from the ceiling in every shape and size and the back yard has a beautiful mural of sunflowers with picnic benches for birthday parties. Speakers face the street so that anyone strolling down Magazine Street can hear oldies, and I cannot even begin to tell you the number of times I headed down the street to the grocery store and got sidetracked into making a candy stop at Lucky You because the music and the colors were just so inviting.
You can often catch Tiffany and her staff of young girls dancing behind the counter, blowing bubbles into the street or making champagne candy cocktails for bridal showers. At all hours of the afternoon and evening I will see groups of teenagers, elderly couples, little kids, walking a block or two away from the store with small brown paper bags full of I can only imagine what kind of sweet goodness. Always makes me want to head over and grab a few gummies.
Tiffany has succeeded in building the store of her dreams and giving something nice, affordable and sweet back to the community. Lucky You! is definitely become a part of the community in New Orleans.
