Anna Marie’s Teas – Liberty, MO

Located right on the historic downtown square of Liberty, it will take you only 10 minutes to walk from Jewell to Anna Marie’s Teas. My first impression of this tea shop is the amazing smell of many different tea blends, from herbal to strong caffeinated tea. With a full wall of tea blends, you can easily spend over 20 minutes in the shop trying to pick your favorite tea. The shop also sells decorative tea sets or cute tea bottles to make a perfect gift basket!

As a tea lover, I have visited the tea shop many times during the past two years at Jewell. I usually get their limited holiday tea for the Fall season. I also recommend their lavender Earl Grey tea. It is my necessity before I walk to class every morning. 

Under The Covers – Kansas City, MO

Under The Covers is a new bookstore specializing in romance literature that recently opened in downtown Kansas City. Even if you don’t need a gift for anyone, I suggest you make a stop and get a gift for yourself. After the visit, you will learn about many subtypes of romance books: sport, teen, mysterious, classic, royals-related and even spicy romance novels. 

In addition to a full wall of books, they have a designated check-in spot for you to take cute pictures or read through some books before you decide to buy them. Also, don’t forget to check out their unique handmade bookmarks. 

Made in KC on the Plaza – Kansas City, MO

This coffee shop/gift shop is a must-stop when you visit the Plaza in Kansas City. The first thing I suggest you do is to grab a hot lavender cappuccino before you explore the gift shop. Right next to the coffee shop, you will find classic KC barbecue sauces along with many other hot sauces and seasonings that are made locally. Deeper in the store is a local ceramic shop, KC T-shirt store and a small bar. If you are above 21, feel free to buy a cocktail and meet some new people while shopping for KC vodka and whiskey. The other half of the shop is the designated space for KC Honey, local home-good stores and a small school shop with cute notebooks and pens. 

Even though this location is a bit far from Jewell, it is the best place to get your friends some fancy gifts this holiday season!

The holiday season is upon us, and with that comes the holiday buying season. For better or worse, the holidays are synonymous with gift-giving. With COVID-19 numbers continuing to rise and restrictions imminent in the area, it can be hard to know how to safely support local business when celebrating. We may not be with all of our loved ones this year, and many presents will have to be shipped instead of placed under the tree, but there are still ways to safely give gifts. 

You may be looking forward to giving gifts after the incredibly hard year we’ve all collectively had, or you may be a bit stressed about how to buy gifts in the safest way possible. While shopping online from a certain giant corporation may be easy and tempting, it’s important to remember that our favorite business owners have had a hard year, too. By supporting local businesses this holiday season, you’ll be giving a gift to both your loved one and the owner you buy from. But if you’re still a little lost on the best ways to do that, you’re not alone. 

It can be hard to know exactly where to buy from – especially if your loved one’s list is linked to all online stores. An easy way to make sure you’re still supporting an independent seller is to do some calling and website searches to see if a local store may have it in stock. 

Many stores have been taking precautions to ensure customer safety, including offering curbside pick up and online ordering. Be sure to sanitize frequently if you do shop in-store – and, of course, wear your mask. If you’re buying clothing, make sure you get the size and measurements of the gift recipient before you shop, that way you can make your shopping trip faster and more efficient, and thus safer. 

If you still don’t know what you want to buy, there’s no need to worry. You can find just about anything you’re looking for right here in Kansas City. Common types of gifts are grouped here in sections for your shopping ease. 

For the book lover: 

Kansas City has quite a few independent bookstores. Prospero’s on W. 39th St. has over 50,000 books in the three-story shop. Coming here is a book lover’s dream. Buying a gift card for the book lover you know allows them to pick out the book perfectly suited to their wants. Rainy Day Books has been in Kansas City, Kan. since 1975, and they have just about any title you can think of. You can order online to be delivered directly to the person you’re gifting the book to. Rainy Day Books also offers gift boxes, which include upwards of three titles in a genre-specific box. Wise Blood Booksellers is fairly new to the Westport scene and has a wide range of titles to choose from. You can also buy a gift certificate or “boredom bundles,” which include a book or two that are hand-selected for each bundle based on genre. 

For the fashion icon: 

There are so many options when it comes to clothing stores in Kansas City. Clothz Minded is a sustainably curated collection of secondhand clothing in Westport that always has new pieces in the store. Masks and hand sanitizer (provided at the entrance) are required for shopping, and you can also order on their website or Instagram stories. For the retro lover in your life, Daisy Lee Vintage has two locations, in the Crossroads and Overland park, full of vintage clothing from the grooviest time periods. ULAH has you covered for ready-to-wear men’s clothing. They also offer styled looks that you can get for the fashion lover in your life who may want to switch up their wardrobe. If you’re looking to give the gift of a great fitting suit, Houndstooth in the River Market is the place to go. Get a gift card from one of these places for the person you’re shopping for, and arrange a time to safely shop at the store after the Christmas rush. 

For the Kansas City proud:

If you’ve noticed people’s clothing the last few years, you’ve definitely seen plenty of Kansas City-specific apparel around town. Charlie Hustle is where you’ll find the iconic KC Heart t-shirts, as well as some other local favorites. Raygun has clothing, glassware, pillows and more that are all covered in Kansas City and Midwest pride (not to mention their witty apparel). Bunker has been offering a plethora of different Kansas City clothing brands since 1997 in their Westport store. Westside Storey carries an array of clothing, accessories and home decor that is all focused on Kansas City. You can’t go wrong with any of these stores. A gift card or item from any one of them is sure to be loved. 

For the gardener:

Whether they love potted plants or outdoor gardens, there are plenty of places to buy gifts for those with a green-thumb in your life. Paradise Garden Club is in the coolest pink warehouse in the Crossroads and has all of the plants – and plant care advice – you could ask for. Virgil’s Plant Shop has a brick & mortar location on Troost but also has a traveling plant bus that will deliver plants to your door. KC Tiny Greenhouse offers a monthly plant box subscription that you can buy for the plant lover in your life – it comes with three 3-inch plants delivered to their door every month. 

There are many more places than these that could have the perfect gift for the person you’re looking for, but these shops are a great place to start. As important as it is to stay safe during the pandemic, we also need to look for ways to continue to support local businesses. Be sure to look out for contactless options when buying, wear a mask and sanitize often if you do buy in-person.

The number of advertisements in my promotions tab of my Gmail does not, as the Japanese organizing consultant Marie Kondo would say, “spark joy.” Every day I am bombarded by advertisements from a variety of stories clamoring about this sale or that— buy quickly, lest the deals expire! Keep consuming to improve your life! Don’t you want to be cool and adhere to the latest trends? 

Where did these advertisements even come from? I hardly remember subscribing to some of these services. The truth of the matter is that our society has become saturated with advertisements that promote a culture of consumerism. Consumerism is defined as the belief that spending copious amounts of money on goods and services beyond what is necessary to meet one’s needs is good because it promotes human happiness. This sentiment has been aggressively promoted by corporations that frequently flaunt their products as improving people’s lives or their reputations. We, as Americans, have come to value a measure of the good focused on popularity and easy-living. 

But how did we get here? Why are we buying things that we don’t need? Why do we think that we need them?

Before the Industrial Revolution, the production of goods was significantly more time-consuming and expensive. Let’s say, for example, that you need a new pair of socks. In the twenty-first century, we get in our cars and drive for about 10 minutes to the nearest Target to purchase some funky dolphin knee-highs. If; however, you happened to live in Aberdeen, a sea-faring community in the northeast coast of Scotland, in 1933, and you needed socks, you would have to make them yourself. A knitting expert, Norman Kennedy, who in fact grew up in Aberdeen, acknowledges the fact that knitting was done out of necessity in those times. “You couldn’t buy socks during the wartime,” says Kennedy. “If they did sell them, they were very poor quality, so people just knitted.” 

As someone who knits recreationally, I can tell you that the funky knee-highs we have so come to adore are hellish concoctions that take months to complete. A single, regular-sized sock equates to about a full day of non-stop knitting for the expert knitter. That’s not accounting for the amount of time or money necessary for the acquisition of yarn (Ever sheared sheep, and then cleaned, carded, and spun wool? Me neither. Nowadays I can just walk into the nearest Michael’s, thankfully). Because of the fact that the production of everyday items was so time-consuming, most people had one or two staples that they took care of religiously. Only the rich could afford to have spectacular wardrobes of carefully tailored evening clothes, or fancy mirrors, or an army of uncomfortable decorative cushions. 

The Industrial Revolution, what with its standardization of parts, the assembly line, and subsequent mass production of goods, drastically reduce the labor and actual cost of goods. Thus, the aforementioned frivolities were now accessible to a greater number of people, not just the rich. People could now accumulate things like socks. But why stop there? Why not get a pair of spanking new converse with those knee-highs? Damn it, now you need a new pair of shorts to complete the look. Suddenly, the average consumer has accumulated piles and piles of things we never really needed in the first place.This spiraling purchasing obsession is called the Diderot Effect. Essentially, when we acquire new things, our previously owned possessions no longer seem to fit in with this new purchase. For Denis Diderot, the French philosopher that gave the Diderot Effect its name, this obsession manifested itself when he bought a brand new robe. Compared to his other possessions, his robe didn’t seem to fit in— it made every other part of his life look drab in comparison. This new good changed part of Diderot’s identity and now all his other goods were no longer cohesive with his conception of himself. Thus, Diderot went on a reactive spending spree. 

Corporations are quite aware of this, and in fact, aggressively capitalize on this. Excessive consumerism is promoted everywhere by such phrases as “retail therapy,” “treat yo’ self,” or “shopping is my cardio.” Entire holidays have been invented to feed into this shopping mania— Black Friday, for example. There’s nothing wrong with buying things. The Industrial Revolution was wonderful in the sense that we became increasingly liberated and could now pursue other tasks that would otherwise be impossible if we were busy making our own clothes, food, or shelter. I’m not at all suggesting that you shirk consumerism all together and adopt the ascetic life of a monk (as some minimalist philosophies would have you do), but it’s important that we become conscious of the negative effects of our unmeasured desires for new things: debt, environmental degradation, depression, to name a few. 

If you want to go out and buy something, take into consideration the general theme of your other possessions so that you can avoid the Diderot Effect. Buy things that you need, not just things you want. A good way to gauge whether or not you need a product is to wait a month before you purchase it. If after a month you still think that you would benefit from the product in your life, then this whim is not a passing fancy. You can also follow a policy of buy one, give one back. Every time you buy a new product, you should try to donate another product that you no longer use to try to give back to the community. Try to go a month without shopping: unsubscribe to advertising magazines or emails and uninstall that online shopping app. You’ll be surprised at how much additional time you’ll have to explore meaningful relationships with others, and yourself.