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Photography by D.J. Wilson
Globe Drugs owner Sandy Cohen and store manager Rick Ruzicka
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If Globe Drugs did not already exist—if it had not survived for more than 70 years, with its own brand of odd business—it would be nearly impossible to create in 2014.
Imagine going into a bank and asking for a business loan to finance a store that sold gift-wrapped “Surprise Packages” for $1.98, 10-pound chocolate bunnies, bobble-head John Kerry dolls from 2004, monosodium glutamate (MSG) by the pound wrapped and weighed in clear plastic bags, Niagara spray starch aerosol cans for a dollar less than Walmart, a Globe Drugs jelly-bean-and-peanut snack mix, beer slightly past its best-sold-by-this-date mark, and a selection of wine that can reward the persistent if they search the racks long enough.
Globe Drugs is an overstock/variety/discount/close-out/discontinued-item store on steroids. (And no, it doesn’t sell steroids, but it does stock just about everything else, including Father John’s remedies.) At one time, there were four stores, but since the last of two stores closed on Cherokee Street in 2010, the lone Globe Drugs remains at 1900 S. Broadway, near Soulard.
Owner Sandy Cohen, age 67, is almost always on the premises, chatting up customers and looking over the eclectic inventory. “People ask is there any item you couldn’t sell,” he says while walking down a crowded aisle. “Well, here we sold a couple of these.” He grabs a box containing a Bissell Roof Rake, which has extensions “for a longer reach.” It’s meant, Cohen thinks, to get leaves and snow off a roof. There are two left, for $17.95 each.
Then, there are the many smaller-ticket items: a wide assortment of snacks, including obscure flavors such as sun-dried tomato-basil-feta hummus crisps (sold in 0.81-ounce bags) and Zapp’s Spicy Cajun Crawtators (sold in 1-ounce bags), with seven bags usually costing only a dollar. (Check the “best sold by” date, though.) Nearby is the usual variety of over-the-counter drugs, canned goods, kitchenware, toiletries, sundry clothing items, made-on-location candy, and a slew of $1 T-shirts from a 2009 basketball tournament that spelled “Meramec” wrong.
Yet perhaps the strangest item in this strange land of variety is the Surprise Package.
Store manager Rick Ruzicka explains the packages are a “way of minimizing our losses.” At Christmas, people call in orders. For $1.98, the buyer gets a bunch of unseen stuff that they might not have bought separately otherwise. “If we bought 48 of an item and they didn’t sell, well, throw that in a Surprise Package with another couple of items that didn’t sell,” says Ruzicka. “In our minds, we got something for it.”
In those packages, you might get a John Kerry bobblehead from the 2004 campaign, a knock-off Strawberry Shortcake clock, a package of Notre Dame trading cards, an Oakland Athletics pennant, a koozie, a Remy Martin bottle cover, a Laclede Gas cookbook, or a “baseball ducky” (a rubber ducky with a baseball player’s face and cap on it). Ruzicka has 2,633 of these baseball duckies in storage, with many of them being fashioned after outfielder Torii Hunter when he played for the Minnesota Twins.
On a recent Saturday, one middle-aged woman was standing in the checkout line with two Surprise Packages. “I get these every time I come in here,” she said to no one in particular. “I don’t know why.” (When asked, she declined to elaborate and preferred not to be quoted by name.)
These packages contain overstock at a store that specializes in overstock. They represent a symbolic subset of a business that has drawn generations of customers, ever since the seven Cohen brothers opened the first store, farther north on Broadway, in 1939. (One of the founding Cohen brothers, Bernard, who's now in his 90s, doesn’t come in much anymore. But Ruzicka says a day doesn’t go by that a customer doesn’t ask how he’s doing.)
Shopping at Globe Drugs may not be addictive, but it can become habitual. The lure is the unexpected and the cheap.
A mother-daughter duo recently trolled the aisles, having made a special trip from South County to check out the week’s bargain buffet. “We were so disappointed when the stores on Cherokee Street closed,” said Carol Hamilton, a 58-year-old realtor who's also an alderwoman in Green Park. “The variety store on Cherokee had that lower level where we did all our Christmas shopping. I used to buy my daughter puzzles there.” (Her daughter, Jamie Lynn, recalled one Christmas in which she received a “life-size doll” that she named Carly from the Cherokee Street store.)
Hamilton says she comes to Globe Drugs because of its “cute, unique things.” Last week, for instance, Ruzicka “turned me on to a really good bottle of wine,” she says. Both mother and daughter were briefly enamored with a $14.95 wooden wine rack built like a coffin with a “7 Deadly Sins” label on it. They thought about it for the backyard, but resisted the temptation.
Not everyone comes just for the eccentricities and nostalgia, though. Some come for basic groceries, beer, and household items. Jacqueline Gorman, age 66, lives within walking distance. She rattles off the reasons that she shops at Globe: “Proximity. No vehicle. My husband’s not in the best of health. We’re on a fixed income. It’s got variety—it’s the ideal place for that,” she said. “Indeed, there are so many things here, you rarely want something they don’t have.”
Forty-seven-year-old Mike Kitchen has only been shopping at Globe for two years, since he started working at Broadway Truck Center down the street. He’s holding two cans of Niagara spray-on starch that go for $1.50 a can—a buck cheaper than Walmart, he says. He also buys the candy, made on the premises, for co-workers.
Ruby Hempen just turned 80 years old in December. She used to live in South City, but now her daughter brings her in from Affton. She’s shopped at Globe for “50 years or longer,” she says. She’s buying peanuts to feed the squirrels and checking out the greeting cards. Not much has changed, she says: “It’s about the same, really. But it was not as crowded back then. It was always clean, and the people are nice.”
Cohen admits to crowded aisles and a certain lack of organization. “If there’s an empty space, we’ll put something there, even if it belongs in a different aisle,” Cohen says. “It’s always changing. You never know what’s going to be coming in. There are opportunities every day.”
At its peak, Globe Drugs had four stores: two on Cherokee, one on Gravois, and a warehouse store at Tucker Boulevard and Spruce Street, catty-corner from the downtown St. Louis Metropolitan Police headquarters. The “variety store” at the corner of Cherokee Street and Ohio Avenue carried a wider range of items, including furniture and toys, before it closed in 2008. The location at Cherokee Street and Texas Avenue closed in 2010.
For decades, Globe Drugs had an iconic and historic presence on Cherokee Street, with its weekly full-page ads on the backside of the South Side Journal driving customers to search its shelves for peculiar bargains. It was the go-to place to buy California Cat Clocks with swinging pendulum tails. Once, Ruzicka says, the store bought cardboard drums of supplies from fall-out shelters and sold the contents.
When it came time to scale back and consolidate into one location, the owners chose 1900 Broadway. Globe’s candies are made there, including heavenly hash, turtles, Irish crème parallelograms, and a chocolate version of a female upper torso on a stick. The store does seem larger and more accessible than the Cherokee Street locations. Both Cohen and Ruzicka admit that running one store is easier than trying to keep two or three open. They have downsized, but they are not giving up. They have a Facebook page, and they talk of periodic “email blasts” to promote sales.
Though Globe Drugs' signage is now gone from Cherokee Street, Cohen has nothing but nice things to say about the neighborhood's ongoing transformation, calling it “fantastic.” And in place of the former location at the corner of Texas Avenue is Strange Overtones Vintage. In homage to Globe Drugs, the business' proprietor, Amy Flauaus, continues the Surprise Package tradition by selling wrapped boxes of "vintage trinkets" for $3. So the surprises continue—though it's unlikely you'll find a Torii Hunter rubber ducky or a John Kerry bobblehead in the mix.
Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect that Strange Overtones Vintage sells its own Globe Drugs-inspired Surprise Packages.
