The Blue Tomatoes

My shop is on a main street, but you can only see it if you know where to look. I have a selective clientele, and they mostly find me through word of mouth. Occasionally, a customer will wander in off the street having never heard of me before, but that is quite rare. Most of the time the customers who enter my shop come in knowing exactly what they need, if not exactly what sort of form it will take.

Last week, I rearranged the store in preparation for the new month’s clientele. The change in the weather brings a change in customers, too. While other shops on my strip have better technology than I do and sell standard roses for sale online, I selected a few of my best products and put them in jars to line the windows of the store. I went to my rooftop and picked a few sprigs of thyme and rosemary, as well as a number of lesser known plants, and displayed them on the barrels in front of my oak seeds.

I pride myself on having a mix of things. Whether a customer needs trinkets or edible food or simply decorations, I aspire to have it all. And if I don’t, I’ll contact the stores in other Australian cities and see if they can send what I need using our patented teleportation service. I had to do that with David Austin roses one time. A regular of mine walked in, and after gently loading her arms with bundles of her regular David Austin roses, she confided that she had an additional problem.

Her daughter was being bullied at school during sport classes due to her lack of coordination, and my customer needed something to prevent the bullying from happening ever again. I knew just the thing: blue tomatoes. By squeezing the juice and combining it with two cups of orange juice, the daughter would gain an hour of coordination skills with no side effects, any time she needed it. But that day I had no blue tomatoes in stock.