Toy Store Research Articles

Marketing digital y el posicionamiento de la MYPE del sector gastronómico Mifruty, Lima Norte, 2021

The objective of this research work was to investigate how digital marketing is related to the positioning of the Mifruty Juicery, considering the good use of the strategies offered by marketing as well as the platforms offered to promote a company, such as social networks or the website, which have taken more strength these last 2 years due to the global crisis and which are fundamental factors for a company to position itself. The research is a non-experimental, correlational-cross-sectional design, the target population are the customers of the toy store Mifruty located in northern Lima and consists of a sample of 100 potential customers. Data collection was through an online questionnaire, which was carried out at the same point of sale of the toy store. The instrument consisted of 23 items and was validated by a specialist in the field. With respect to the reliability of the instrument constructed for the variables used, they were analyzed and approved by means of Cronbach's Alpha system, resulting in a high reliability, which allowed us to collect data for the research study to be conducted in the Mifruty Juicery. Similarly, according to statistical tests, 9 % of respondents consider that Mifruty Juicery regularly employs digital marketing, being the social networks and the company's website poorly managed due to its few and not so striking contents, so they fail to meet the expectations of its customers. Likewise, 17 % of the respondents consider a regular positioning in the market, so by implementing the right marketing strategies the positioning would rise.

RANCANG BANGUN SISTEM MONITORING PENJUALAN BARANG DI TOKO MAINAN LOVELLA TOYS

Companies that master technology and information will be able to master and become leaders in their field of business. By utilizing information technology, companies can run business processes more quickly and can process data more accurately. Lovella Toys Toy Store is a company engaged in selling toys for hobbies. Recording of sales that still uses Manual Notes for proof of transactions every day, and then at the end of the sale will be input into a Microsoft Excel file. It can make the data inaccurate because can be an input error that causes the transaction not input correctly in the Sales Data Format. A web-based computerized system is needed so that every piece of information provides added value to the process of quality management, decision-making, and problem-solving along with a competitive advantage that is useful for sales activities. This study uses qualitative research methods using field research approaches and library research in its data collection methods. The results are in the form of a web-based monitoring data processing system prototype which is expected to minimize and even solve current problems.

SISTEM INFORMASI PENJUALAN PADA TOKO ANARMAN STORE BERBASIS WEB

Toko Anarman Store is a toy store that sells various kinds of toys, education, and home decor. This shop still uses a manual system for sales transactions, with the process of selling goods usually still written on notes and then summarized in a sales book. The seller must check each item individually and record the results in a book to determine the number of items in the store. Therefore this web-based Sales Information System is designed to assist the sales process at the store. The purpose of this system is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process. This system includes several important features which include product management, supplier management, and report printing. Product management includes adding, deleting, and updating product data available in the store. Printing includes printing sales reports, stock reports, consumer reports, and supplier reports. This information system is made using the Sublime Text 3 application while the programming language uses PHP, Xampp is used to run the web server, MySQL is used for database management. With this system, it is hoped that Anarman Store can improve operational efficiency and increase customer satisfaction. This system can also help in making better decisions based on accurate sales data.

<em>Roblox</em> and Meta Verch

<em>Roblox</em> and Meta Verch

An experimental test of cause-related marketing and charitable giving

Abstract We conducted a natural field experiment at a local toy store in Anchorage, Alaska to estimate the effect on consumer behavior when the firm’s charitable donation is conditional on the total dollar amount of the individual transaction. Results suggest that the donation offer resulted in a modest increase in both the share of transactions exceeding the minimum amount needed to qualify for the donation and sales revenue.

Play Is a Child’s Work (on Instagram)

Play Is a Child’s Work (on Instagram)

My Mind Was a Military Sky

My Mind Was a Military Sky

PENERAPAN ANALISA SWOT DALAM RANCANG BANGUN APLIKASI PENJUALAN TOKO MAINAN ANAK BERBASIS WEB

The birth and rapid development of the internet into one of the cheapest communication infrastructures and, a wide acceptance rate. By bringing the advantages of the internet such as 24-hour service, access from all directions at a relatively low cost, and other conveniences. Golfy Toys Store is a toy store that only markets via offline marketing by making banners and other offline marketing tools. The process of selling goods is usually still written in the sales book. This affects the revenue earned. A sales system is needed, namely a system that can help speed up the process of making notes that are already automatic, so they don't need to be written on books. The results with this website-based sales system are to help stores improve store branding and provide added value in business models that will strengthen the competitive value of their business in the future amid intense competition with shops selling similar products.

Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 by Evan Burr Bukey

Reviewed by: Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 by Evan Burr Bukey Joshua Parker Evan Burr Bukey, Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 197 pp. Second World War resistance continues to have an important relevance to Austrian national identity. The main points raised by the research in Evan Burr Bukey's Juvenile Crime and Dissent in Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945 relate to two questions. Youth resistance movements in occupied countries like France and Denmark, and in cities like Hamburg and Munich, are well documented—but what of youth resistance in the "Ostmark"? And what do we mean, as Karl Stadler once asked, by "resistance," by "dissent," and by criminalized acts prosecuted by a government that is itself criminal? Bukey's research is based on records from the Viennese Municipal and Provincial Archives and the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Only partial records exist—many were accidentally discarded in 1999. Bukey surveys the remaining 437 judicial records, the largest group of which are from 1945. Individual cases offer glimpses of the family backgrounds of those charged. After 1938, treason cases were tried by laws based on Prussian jurisprudence in People's Courts, whose judges often abused and humiliated those found guilty. Aside from treason, Austrian criminal code largely preserved continuity before and after 1938, though now interpreted through "völkisch norms" (11). Bukey suggests that Hitler's regime controlled youth crime more effectively in Vienna than in other large cities of the Reich (162). During the first few months after the Anschluss, youths convicted of break-ins and petty theft were often sent to youth detention centers for [End Page 164] several months. More serious theft was punished with hard labor. Moral offenses, particularly homosexuality for those over sixteen years of age, were punished more harshly. But the most severe punishments were reserved for political acts of defiance. A turning point came with the introduction of the Reich Juvenile Court Act in 1944, which sought to pass judgments based on character. Children diagnosed as "precocious juvenile criminals" were sent to the psychiatric division of a correctional facility; youth deemed capable of reform were treated more lightly (122). Homosexuality, with arrests rising sharply from 1938 to 1945, was punished under the Austrian penal code, while illicit intercourse with foreigners was punished under Nazi racial ordinances. In Vienna, 75 percent of juvenile convictions involved property crimes, and absent fathers were seen as a major cause of youth delinquency. Much of the volume's interest lies in its vignettes of everything from angry public verbal outbursts to sabotage, including a sixteen-year-old arrested for stealing switches from Viennese streetcars in 1945 (152). An eleven-year-old was discovered scribbling "Hail Moscow" on scraps of paper in a toy store, which led to the arrest of twenty children involved in a resistance ring (35). A seventeen-year-old mechanic was sentenced to three months of confinement for questioning the war effort, refusing to listen to Hitler's speeches, and proclaiming that Hitler could "kiss his ass" (88). Five youths were arrested by the Gestapo for loudly applauding at a choir performance by Russian émigrés. Several teenagers were imprisoned for joining the Austrian Freedom Movement. Others typed and distributed flysheets based on British news reports and were beaten and sent to Berlin to stand trial for high treason, sentenced either to death or to half a dozen years of prison. Former staunch Social Democrats had often become radicalized Communists under Schuschnigg's regime, a transition that increased following the invasion of the Soviet Union. Of some two thousand Communists arrested by the Vienna Gestapo, at least thirty were minors (107), who were more severely punished than other resistors. After 1943, crackdowns were made on partial Jews, often for absenteeism, labor indiscipline, attempting to flee abroad or escape deportation, or spreading "false rumors" (109). Offenses committed by Viennese adolescents "mutated as the war drew to its conclusion" (126), with the increasing theft of goods that could be sold on the black market or food and increasing refusals to work or instances of tardiness. During the war, juveniles convicted of subversive activities (whether listening to foreign...

Hiring at Huckle Buckle Beanstalk: Not All Fun and Games

David Brown is the owner of Huckle Buckle Beanstalk, a small high-end toy store in Staunton, Virginia. Brown has recently fired his store manager, Jeff Gibson, for theft—a decision that affected the remaining employees in a way Brown did not expect—and is under pressure to hire a new store manager. Brown is considering three applicants and has asked them to come in for an interview. Each presents a different mix of experience and skills on paper, and through the interview process, Brown hopes to learn additional information about each applicant's approach to management. Brown is challenged to consider his business's needs and the different opportunities and challenges presented by each of the candidates, since none is a perfect fit. Because Brown needs the store manager to be responsible for daily operations while he focuses on strategy, he needs to make a decision quickly. This case can be useful in a range of courses, especially ones focused on entrepreneurship, management of small enterprises, and human resource management. Excerpt UVA-ENT-0192 Rev. Mar. 23, 2020 Hiring at Huckle Buckle Beanstalk: Not All Fun and Games Introduction David Brown sat at his desk in the stock room of his toy store, Huckle Buckle Beanstalk, looking at the three resumes in front of him. Brown leafed through his notes, sighed, and set the paperwork back down. He needed a new store manager, and these three resumes were his top choices from the applicant pool—the people he was about to bring in for interviews. Each of these candidates offered a different mix of skills and experience, and he hoped he would have the unusual luxury of having one rise to the top in the afternoon interviews. He had fired his previous store manager just over a month earlier for theft, and he knew that the business would suffer if he had to continue managing the store himself. The critical ordering season for the holidays was coming up, and he couldn't afford to have his attention divided. He felt the pressure to find the right person, and soon. Growing a Toy Store . . .

Scholar Spotlight: Soraya Murray

Scholar Spotlight:Soraya Murray Interview by TreaAndrea M. Russworm Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Soraya Murray (Derek Conrad Murray, 2020). Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture with particular interest in art, film, and video games. An associate professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Murray's first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018), examines how post-9/ 11 era mainstream games mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes, and even complex struggles for recognition. In recent years, her writings have focused on both methodological and ethical considerations of critical game studies as well as modeling intersectional approaches that consider race, gender, class, nation, and sociopolitical context. TreaAndrea M. Russworm: In relation to your work as a whole, how do you perceive the audience(s) for your work? Soraya Murray: I write for visual studies and cultural studies scholars and students, for those interested in mass media, and really for anyone who looks at video games—or, more generally, visual cultures of technology—and wants a humanistic [End Page 1] framework for understanding them. My work is a delivery device for theoretical consideration of the advanced technological culture in which we live today, refracted through approachable visual forms like films and video games. There is a persisting failure of the imagination regarding the futures we envision for ourselves and who belongs in them. I would describe what I'm doing as a project of inclusive reframing, of revisionist intervention, or an opening up of possibilities. Russworm: Can you say a little about your interests as a scholar and teacher and what brought you to study art and games? Murray: My interest in visual culture came from visiting museums all over the world, something my parents insisted on when we traveled. I was first socialized into advanced technology through my access to home console video games and later through grade school programs in Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming. Also, my parents met on a blind date at a party celebrating Neil Armstrong's first moon walk in 1969. Somehow my fate feels tied up in that utopian promise of the space race. In terms of pursuing academia, I always respected and venerated the educators in my life. As a kid, I used to beg to go to the bookstore, like other kids beg for the toy store. I was captivated by screens. I loved films that were extremely heady and, in retrospect, conventionally inappropriate for my age. The signs were there from the start, but it was a long and twisty path to find my way to academia as a profession. Some people seem to know from very early on exactly what they should be doing in life; I had to see past other people's expectations, to follow my instincts and proclivities. Russworm: Please reflect on what it means to you to play, study, and teach video games in a technical and cultural climate that has so often promoted racism, sexism, homophobia, and other discriminatory practices. Have these realities influenced your work or experiences with video games? Murray: The encoding of technology as the domain of white male genius has been manufactured in the US context over a long period of time and with concerted effort. These perceptions around who can be the authentic innovator and who is relegated to the consumer have been shored up in education, mass culture, and the workplace. The promotion of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other discriminatory practices is a sign of weakness in the industry, not strength. Being in Silicon Valley, I see that the constant flow of people who make these innovations possible is extremely diverse—it is literally like living in an international airport terminal. But this is quite discontinuous with the ideology and the public-facing image of innovation. Having a historical understanding of how these ideologies have come into being helps me to keep perspective that the friction that I may experience in the classroom or in professional circumstances is a by-product of long social programming...

Reja-e BusailahPoems of a Palestinian Boyhood

Books in Review Written in 2012, the novel’s almost flippant , deeply cynical tone calls to mind the excesses of the early 2000s more than the current relationship between consumer and society today. Rather than feeling connected to Farah and Joanne as well as the cast of supporting characters, they remain largely at arm’s length, defined predominantly by their shallowness. Despite moments of compelling reflection on the ways in which consumerism drives and exacerbates insecurity , isolation, and unhappiness, the book ultimately falls flat as commentary. Bridey Heing Washington, DC Juan José Millás From the Shadows Trans. Thomas Bunstead & Daniel Hahn. New York. Bellevue Literary Press. 2019. 208 pages. THE INVISIBLE BUTLER did it. That’s the high-concept vision of Spanish novelist Juan José Millás’s quirky, dark comedy From the Shadows. The winner of several of Spain’s literary prizes, this is his first book to be published in North America in English. When forty-three-year-old Damian Lobo loses his job as a multitasker in high tech—a job he’s had since he was eighteen —he chalks it up to the “heartlessness of today’s capitalism.” He aimlessly wanders a mall in Madrid until he comes upon an antiques market. There, after he shoplifts a gold tie clip, he is pursued by security and eventually hides out in a one-hundred-yearold wardrobe that becomes his shelter and his home for the remainder of the book. The womblike nature of the vintage piece of furniture allows him to create a new self, a newborn personality. He identifies as a moray eel, “lying in wait for some prey, or protecting himself from a predator of its own.” His prey and his predator are a “normal family” of bourgeois suburbanites on the outskirts of the city. Federico, the manager of an electronic toy store; his wife, Lucia, who works for a bakery known for its artisanal breads and pastries; and their teenage daughter, Maria, enjoy the luxuries of their three-bedroom bungalow. When Lucia unknowingly brings Damian into their routine life, he becomes the tenant of the wardrobe and their unseen butler. Lucia buys the clothes cupboard after she recognizes it as one that once belonged to her grandparents. She and her twin brother, Jorges, would hide and play inside it. There are height marks scratched into it. After Jorges dies at an early age, Lucia no longer enjoys the dark insides of the massive closet. When she purchases it and brings it home, she finds it is too large for the bedroom and ends up placing it in front of an already built-in wall unit. Damian creates a cavelike environment for himself between the two pieces. He surreptitiously becomes part of the family’s daily life, embedded in the household as a “kindly poltergeist willingly keeping house.” When they are out, he takes on all the necessary tasks to maintain order. He makes the beds, washes the dishes, cooks supper, irons, vacuums, dusts, repairs broken appliances . The family is oblivious to all this, until Lucia begins to suspect something is awry. She has an interest in the paranormal and believes there may be a specter in the house. When a Ghost Butler logs in on an internet forum, Lucia is certain it is her spirit of the wardrobe. Throughout the novel, Damien continues to invent his new individuality. Part of that includes ongoing imaginary monologues with a nonexistent tabloid TV interviewer , Sergio O’Kane. His exchanges with O’Kane—and then another more elitist journalist, Inako Gabilondo—provide background to his childhood and the formative sexual fixations he had on his adopted Chinese sister. They also convince him that he suffers from depersonalization, a dissociative personality disorder that may derive from social exclusion and alienation as a result of the economic system. When Damien discovers Federico’s secret life—more egregious than his own closeted identity—he plots to seek vengeance for Lucia. The bizarre conclusion to the novel is completely unexpected yet totally logical. Millás makes the incredulous believable. A seductive narrator, brisk dialogue, and a unique claustrophobic setting contribute to a distinctive blend of Kafka’s surrealism and Pirandello’s...

Currents of Progress, Toy Store for Tourists: Nineteenth-Century Mexican Liberals View the Niagara Falls

The essay addresses the depiction of the Niagara Falls as an ambivalent symbol of progress in nineteenth-century Mexican travel accounts of the United States. At that time, various Mexican intellectuals spent some time in the USA. In diaries and travelogues, some of them articulated their views of their host country but also reflected on their own society through the contrast with their northern neighbor. The Mexican visitors expressed a particular fascination with signs of modernity in the United States. Interestingly, such signifiers included not only political and social institutions and economic and industrial advancements, but also the Niagara Falls as a site of both natural and technological wonders. Examining the depiction of the Falls in major nineteenth-century Mexican travelogues of the United States, the essay illuminates some of the metaphorical “uses of nature” for articulating socio-political ideas as well as experiences of mobility.

Implementation of Inventory Management System (IMS) case study on XYZ online store business unit

XYZ baby and child shop is a new player in the business of selling toys and baby gears. Consumers target for XYZ toy shop is segmentation of middle and upper financial ability buyers. XYZ toy store sells imported toys and baby products with high quality products, using international grade production materials and ISO production certificates: 9002. With this conceptual, establishment XYZ business line is as a provider (seller) toys and baby equipment premium brand; then the scope of the product sold must meet all expectations of market demands. Meet the expectations of market demand is not easy; because by fulfilling all expectations, then the impact is the high stock of goods that must be available. The high stock of goods will directly impact on the needs of a large storage area of goods and reduce money. Based on the previous description, the formulation of the problem in this research is: "What inventory management strategy can be applied to improve the productivity of Lean Manufacturing business unit of XYZ online store?"

Low Cost Task Trainer for Neonatal Umbilical Catheterization

Author(s): Feeks, Caitlin; Fan, Linda | Abstract: ABSTRACT: Audience: The low cost neonatal umbilical catheterization task trainer is designed to instruct physicians in pediatrics, emergency medicine (EM) and pediatric emergency medicine (PEM). Introduction: Umbilical catheterization can be a lifesaving technique in the emergent management of a critically ill neonate. Umbilical catheterization remains a common procedure in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) setting but is performed less frequently in the emergency department (ED). Given its infrequent nature in the ED, procedural simulation in umbilical catheterization is a necessary component of medical training to gain proficiency and competency in this important technique. Commercially available umbilical catheterization models are available but often represent an expensive investment upwards of a thousand dollars for a single trainer. The expense of these high-fidelity models may be unfortunately cost prohibitive for many departments seeking to offer this simulation training for their physicians. In an effort to diminish the cost associated with these models, a “home built” model was trialed. It was easily constructed with readily available items found in the hospital, the household setting, and the local home improvement and toy store. Each task trainer allows for identification of the umbilical arteries and vein with the ability to catheterize either vessel. Objectives: By the end of this instructional session learners should: 1) Discuss the indications, contraindications, and complications associated with umbilical catheterization. 2) Competently perform umbilical catheterization on the task trainer. 3) Demonstrate proper securement of the catheter. Methods: An umbilical cord was constructed using suction catheters to represent the umbilical arteries and nasal canula oxygen tubing was used to represent the umbilical vein. These tubes were suspended in a silicone base and rolled into a log form to simulate the umbilical cord. A small circular hole was cut into the hollow abdomen of a commercially available plastic toy doll and a section of the umbilical cord was inserted. Once assembled, the task trainer can be used in an instructional procedure session to teach umbilical vessel catheterization. The cord can be tied off and cut, allowing for identification of the umbilical vessels. The vessels (either artery or vein) can be cannulated using a variety of catheter sizes, and ultimately the catheter can be sutured or taped in place. The task trainers can be reused multiple times.Topics: Neonatal resuscitation, umbilical catheter, umbilical catheterization, umbilical cannulation, instruction, simulation, emergency medicine, pediatrics, neonatal.

The End of the Line: A New York Diary

The End of the Line: A New York Diary Katherine Sharpe (bio) When I graduated from college, I knew what I wanted so clearly that I even had a word for it, “community.” Though I couldn’t define the term precisely, I knew how it would feel: like a version of that warm and nebulous thing that had embraced us during college itself. After graduation, my best friend Anna and I began meeting after work in a dark bar and grill off Pioneer Square in Portland, Oregon. Our jobs—hers at a toy store; mine at the local paper, unpaid—struck us as all right, but limited. When we gathered in our sticky booth, what we talked about most often was a big move to a big city, someplace we could find people and activities as promising as we felt ourselves to be. A few months later, I went home to Virginia to take an internship at a nonprofit organization’s member magazine. The job paid, and rent at my parents’ place was free, though I missed having people my own age to hang out with. Still, when Anna called to suggest, then demand, that we move to New York, what I felt at first was terror. The kind of community I yearned for was slow and warm, more small-town than metropolitan. But hadn’t we sat for hours at the bar, nursing drinks and saying things like “I think New York is the only place in the country where people go if they’re serious”? We had, and because I could not forget this, because I couldn’t not be serious, and because I found it difficult to impossible, at that time in my life, to say no to anyone, I agreed. [End Page 651] ________ Anna was still on the West Coast, so finding an apartment fell to me. On a cold and blindingly sunny December morning, my mother drove me from our home in suburban Washington, DC, dropping me off in front of a small storefront bus station in DC’s Chinatown, where I bought a 12-dollar ticket and sailed into the unknown. On the bus I met a group of people a little older than me that included a speaker of fluent Chinese. At the other end, he led us to a tiny restaurant under the Manhattan Bridge and ordered wonton noodle soup for everyone. He showed me how to season the broth with plum vinegar and chili oil, how to ask for greens on top, how to make a cheap meal. A friend from high school who had just started at NYU Law let me sleep on his tiny patch of dorm-room floor. In the morning, I rode the subway to Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood so many people had asked Anna and me if we were moving to we’d decided we might as well. The area struck me as confusing and ugly. Rows of attached houses with vinyl siding terminated in Italian bakeries filled with dry cookies in sickly hues. There was no skyline, and I couldn’t get my bearings. I started to walk anyway, and as I did the surroundings began to change, turning more industrial, more like the urban landscape I’d imagined and hoped for. Near Metropolitan Avenue, I noticed scruffy people only slightly older than I was trickling out of a scarred brick building the size of a city block. They were all heading the same direction, so I did too, until I popped out on Bedford Avenue and recognized I was home. Over the next days, I met with a few real estate brokers. To hire a broker to rent an apartment seemed insane, but we’d been told it was what people did. I almost welcomed it—as a sign that New York was different from other places, that life here would be a life apart. The broker I ended up renting with wore a yarmulke, a full beard, and a black suit over a white shirt. He drove too fast, was nice to me in a brusque way, and refused to shake my hand. “It’s against my religion,” he explained. I...

Játékszer – áruház – építészet a budapesti Árkád-bazár, a vágó fivérek műve 1909-ből

The first and only large toy store in Budapest, the socalled Árkád-bazár was built in 1908-09 according to the designs of József and László Vágó. The company that commissioned the building, Késmárky & Illés, was one of Budapest’s leading toy trading companies. Founded in 1879, it sold not only toys but also a wide range of home ornaments and furnishings. Its shops were always located along Rákóczi Road and Kossuth Lajos Street, which was one of Budapest’s foremost arteries of commerce, connecting Keleti railway station with the inner city of Pest. In 1907 the company undertook its largest investment ever, the construction of a new building to house their toy trade branch. The building to be erected was not a department store but an example of the shop-cumapartment block combination so typical of the commercial avenues of Budapest from the 1890s onwards. Above its two business levels it had four residential ones. In April 1907 the owner and his wife bought two adjoining lots at the corner of Dohány Street and Síp Street, well visible from Rákóczi Road. It was the renowned modern architectural firm of László and József Vágó whom they commissioned with planning the new building. The Árkád-bazár in Budapest was a typical multifunctional metropolitan building, with an interior arrangement determined – apart from the specificities of the building lot – primarily by the desire to maximize retail space, shop window length and the income from rents. Fire-safety considerations stressed by the municipal authorities also played a considerable role in forming the building. Like other buildings of the similar type, it was to appear in the cityscape first and foremost as a giant advertisement of the trading company housed on its lower floors. Instead of working with the routine elements of early 20th century commercial architecture József and László Vágó met these requirements in an innovative way, with unique and personal solutions to the distribution of the retail space and the composition of the elevations. In 1909 the sharp lines, prismatic forms, geometrically stylized, contrasting volumes of the Árkád-bazár were unquestionably a novelty in the architecture of the Hungarian capital, a rupture with the soft, smooth, wavy forms of the art nouveau houses so popular in the previous years. However, the most important merit of the Árkád-bazár was probably that here the Vágó brothers found innovative solutions to the very specific artistic problems of the building type: uniting the swathes of the commercial and the residential levels into one coherent composition, integrating the advertising function into the building fronts. By utilizing a few characteristic elements of early 20th century ‘children’s art’ on and in their building, the Vágó brothers not only found a truly adequate form of advertising the toy store housed in it, but also managed to endow Árkád-bazár with a certain charm and humour unique in the local architecture of the period.

Hiring at Huckle Buckle Beanstalk: Not all Fun and Games

David Brown sat at his desk in the stock room of his toy store, Huckle Buckle Beanstalk, looking at the three résumés in front of him. He needed a new store manager, and these three résumés were his top choices. Each offered a different mix of skills and experience, and he hoped he would have the unusual luxury of having one rise to the top in the afternoon interviews. He had fired his previous store manager just over a month earlier for theft, and he knew that the business would suffer if he had to continue managing the store himself.

Browsing the past: Leigh Hunt and the memorial function of shopping

Previous scholarly commentaries on shopping in the long eighteenth century have tended to focus on the immediate sensual, communal and imaginative pleasures of this activity – namely, the aesthetic spectacle of things, the shaping of public sites and communities of sociability, and the facilitation, via consumer goods, of hedonistic fantasy. The entertainment value of shopping was thought to lie in these three sometimes entangled diversions. Yet this article argues that a wholly different kind of pleasure emerges in Leigh Hunt's 1820 essays ‘Of the Sight of Shops’ and ‘A Nearer View of Some Shops’. Hunt's flâneuresque descriptions of shopping in London focus on the memories, both personal and more broadly cultural, evoked by the consumer spaces entered and products seen. Hunt in fact anticipates the conflation of the museum and the shop that theorists of popular culture associate with the twentieth-century emergence of the department store. For Hunt, the pleasures of shopping – whether in a crowded toy store or in the cavernous gallery of Benjamin West – are of a nostalgic sort that recapture the very experiences, like solitude and reflection, thought to be eroded by the advent of consumer capitalism.

Tales of Grace: Reflections on the Joyful Mysteries by Luigi Santucci (review)

Reviewed by: Tales of Grace: Reflections on the Joyful Mysteries by Luigi Santucci Kimberly F. Baker (bio) Tales of Grace: Reflections on the Joyful Mysteries. By Luigi Santucci. Translated by Demetrio S. Yocum. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2015. 144 pp. $18.99. Tales of Grace makes manifest a “feast of delight” the Italian essayist and storyteller, Luigi Santucci, finds life in Christ to be. As the narrator of Tales of Grace declares, “Only Christ was able to transform earth in a feast of delights” (123). Santucci knew well the challenging realities of life, having worked for the resistance movement in fascist Italy, particularly through an underground newspaper. Yet, writing in 1946 while Europe was still reeling in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, Santucci has his narrator insist, “Christ taught us to find [joy] in everything, even in the most problematic and testing circumstances” (125). Such joy radiates through these reflections, available in English for the first time in this exquisite translation by Demetrio S. Yocum. The five chapters unfold as meditations on the joyful mysteries of the rosary (Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and the Finding of Jesus at the Temple). The narrator’s first “Hail Mary” opens the way to delightful experiences such as talking to an angel, serving as a dairy boy for the Virgin Mary, meeting the Christ Child, and even himself becoming an infant nursed by Mary. The meditations have a discursive nature as the narrator and other characters move between stories, time periods, and locations. The narrator visits Mary at the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah in one chapter, while in a later one he attends his university’s alumni reunion. Likewise, soon after giving birth in a stable, the Virgin Mary visits the narrator in a toy store decorated for Christmas. This movement of characters between time and place helps to cultivate an awareness of Christ’s salvific presence in all of life as his story reaches from the biblical past into the present age. The chapters are filled with stories of miracles, angelic interventions, and divine presence, yet they also show many people unaware of such spiritual presence [End Page 250] around them. For example, in Chapter 1’s reflection on the Annunciation, the narrator converses with an angel and suggests that the angels envy the lavish attention Christ gives to human beings. He describes temporal life as a time of engagement with Christ. Yet, several pages later he observes that humans take Christ for granted and pay him little attention. Rather than rebuking humanity for this lack of awareness, the narrator marvels at the irony that humanity counts time from the birth of Christ. Human beings may take Christ for granted, but the very passing of time, of their lives, is marked in relation to Christ. Thus, Santucci calls life a “second Eucharist” in which even time itself revolves around the presence of Christ (34). In contrast to humanity’s frequent lack of awareness of Christ’s presence in the world, Santucci’s creative stories make clear that creation itself knows Christ is in its midst. For example, in the reflection on the Visitation, the animals and land of the region around the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah in Ein Karim experience a surprisingly robust fertility when Mary comes to visit. Nature already knows the wonder of Christ’s presence and begins in earnest to prepare the food for this child who is yet to come. The cows and goats in particular produce such an abundance of milk that the farmers cannot keep up with all the milking. The angel Gabriel secretly comes to their aid by milking the animals at night until Mary discovers him there and insists that he must return to heaven. Providentially, the narrator arrives at Ein Karim for a visit just in time to replace Gabriel as the dairy boy. In contrast to the generous response of these goats and cows to the impending birth of Christ, the narrator discovers that the neighbors view the impending birth quite differently. They recognize that there is something unusual about Mary’s child and that his presence has prompted the over-abundance...