Why the groundhog?

Coming to the realization the Groundhog sale is only a week away.

I was laying in bed the other night and as the usual ten thousand thoughts were flying through my head...

What do I have for school lunches tomorrow...
Crap, it's raining, I hope I didn't leave anything good outside...
Need to get my tailgate fixed....
Where should we go on vacation...
and I hope it's not too muddy for the Groundhog.........
THE GROUNDHOG!   OMG!   It's next week!

My brain started running down memory lane and wondering what started this event in the first place.  Before I knew it, it was midnight,  and I was laughing myself to sleep ......

A vintage Lucketts Groundhog sale postcard

First...why the Groundhog?

It was our very first year in business.  We opened August 1, 1996.  All was going well - we had a good Fall and were going into the winter.  Back in the day, winter was a little more bleak out here in the country.  We were not quite as well known as we are now, and let's just say when December hit, it was pretty much just us, the mice, and the ghost of Mr. Lucketts (I'll write about him later)....

It was pretty clear that nobody was coming here for Christmas, and I wondered what might make anybody visit us 'til spring.  I knew that basically there's nothing like a big fat sale.....but it's
something antique shops generally never do.  It's hard to get all of the dealers on the same page...as they are pretty attached to their stuff, and the thought of letting it go at a reduced price doesn't happen.

Well...I didn't just want reduced prices... I wanted insane prices...I wanted us to clear the place out and start over for spring.  Freshen it all up!  I wanted our customers to have a major big fat reason for wanting to come all the way out here.  We brainstormed for themes for our sale and went through the gamut of..."cabin fever sale" ... "dead of winter sale"..."prices so low you'll be frozen in your tracks"......and so on.  I scanned the calender for a holiday that was a little offbeat.  And there...smiling right at me from my February page was the Groundhog!

It was one hundred percent perfect, except for one thing...  What if the weather is bad?  That's probably a pretty big reason most little shops don't do special events in the dead of winter.  Well...what if the weather isn't bad?  How bad can it be?.......(fast forward to winter of 2009/2010... 3 feet of snow... I guess it can be bad...we'll talk about that later too!)

So we found ourselves a cute picture of a groundhog on the front of a birthday card, cut him out, stuck him on a postcard, made a 250 xerox copies, mailed him out and Groundhog Day at the Lucketts Store was born.

How did it go?
Well lets just say .... it went really, really good!