Best Dollar Store 2005 | Just 99 | Goods & Services | South Florida
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Best Dollar Store

Just 99

Whether it's the basics you need or to cut corners on household expenses, Just 99 carries an impressive supply of groceries, cleaning products, knickknacks, and useful life accessories all for the slightest expenditure of the green. Taking the kids to the beach? This store has plastic shovels, goggles and snorkels, and paddle games to make the day. The grocery aisles offer juice, canned goods, and an array of spices, all for the most attainable level of greenbacks. In addition, it's a good place to save on those little extras that you need around the house, like night-lights, bungee cords, fabric softener, hangers, and picture frames. Sometimes you just don't need to spend more. There's even one 99-cent investment that will help pass on the penny-pinching ethic to the next generation: big plastic piggy banks that end up paying for themselves.

Best Lawn Ornament

Mad Tikis

In 1994, Carl "Marty" Gouveia suffered the loss of three fingers on his dominant right hand to a car accident. How did he channel his frustration? By swinging a chain saw around. A 1985 graduate of the Fort Lauderdale Institute of Art and a third-generation sign-painting artist, "Mad Marty" shifted his focus. Sure, he kept on painting billboards, motorcycles, and surfboards, but he discovered a knack for sculpting tiki-style totem poles. Carved out of palm wood and sealed for protection against the elements, the tikis come in three-foot to six-foot sizes. Eyes? Choose "squint" or "alien" style. Teeth? Choose "fang" or "square." As Marty is fond of saying, "Art is not a thing. It is a way... I hope you enjoy, and God bless."

Best Furniture Store

City Furniture

This place is so big that it should have its own mayor (think about it, Sheriff Ken). The place has a 90,000-square-foot showroom on two levels. It also has a huge, 540,000-square-foot warehouse that serves as a distribution center for the other 16 stores in this local chain, all of them between Homestead and West Palm Beach. And yes, located on the edge of the Everglades right off the Sawgrass Expressway, it's a monument to out-of-control sprawl. But damn, man, there are deals to be made. Getting to them, however, can be a bit daunting without the help of, say, a tall, well-manicured, and quite gorgeous saleswoman. But she passed us at the door in favor of a more monied-looking fellow in a suit, so we were left alone to sort out the place on our own. First, we followed our noses, which led us to the free fresh-baked cookies and coffee. Nice. Then we found our way to the back, where thousands of pieces of furniture sat in a warehouse waiting to be plucked up by a smart buyer. People, it's called "Clearance," and at City Furniture, there's 20,000 square feet of bargains. If you can stand a flaw or two, you can get a hellacious deal. Ten-foot long, four-seat, Natuzzi leather couch with a built-in ottoman on one end: $750. A nice wooden TV stand: $250. Delivery charge: $55. Classing up the family room and freeing up some couch space for the kids: priceless.

Best Pawn Shop

Ready Cash Pawn & Loan I

What makes a pawn shop the best pawn shop? Its proximity to you when you need cash, quick. And that means that Ready Cash I's location -- smack in the middle of downtown Hollywood, where money seems to evaporate from your wallet -- is ideal. Between wining and dining your date at Mama Mia's Italian Grille and stumbling your way to Club M, you can unload one of your gold chains or turn in your moped at Ready Cash to pay for the evening's adventures. The place even buys broken jewelry! Buyers in need of a $100 surfboard, a selection of Snap-On tools, or $8 VHS tapes could comparison-shop at the owners' two other pawn shops on Hollywood Boulevard -- but they're way the hell down the street.

Best Display of Wealth

Design Center of the Americas

You find yourself picking dimes off the ground, borrowing DVDs from the library because of your Blockbuster late fees, and ruing the waste of the last few drops of gasoline dripping from the nozzle. You are, face facts, a schlub. But, good Lord willing, one day -- one day -- you will join the pampered upper-crusties who can projectile-vomit cash for Italian leather love seats and goatskin tables and Myanmar walnut hardwood floors. You will have a 12-nozzle programmable shower in your guesthouse bedroom. You will spend $1,300 on a rocking chair without even furrowing your Botoxed brow. Your living space will look like the inside of the Design Center of the Americas, that gleaming, hotel-sized snob hive between Boomers! and Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport along I-95. It's a world-class collection of 150 studios and 775,000 square feet of answers to the question: What the hell is inside all those South Florida mansions and yachts? Oriental rugs that cost as much as a new hatchback, it turns out.

Best Brows

Mona's Fashions

Hair is no trivial thing in South Florida. Keeping it trimmed, hedged, plucked, or sculpted is an ongoing battle for the better-body set. Front and center in the hirsute battlefield are those pesky eyebrows, some of which Mother Nature has chosen to fashion after the full-bodied caterpillar. While many choose to keep the brow shapely by waxing, there's a much better, older method of hair removal called threading, practiced by Kitu, the owner of Mona's Fashions. It takes only a couple of minutes. Kitu wraps two threads around her fingers and thumbs, then whisks them smartly around the eyebrow, plucking the hairs between the strands. The method has long been preferred by Indians and Middle Easterners, who also use it for removing other facial hair. Kitu argues that waxing eyebrows causes wrinkles and saggy eyelids because of all the tugging -- a claim you can take or leave. What's not debatable, however, is that there's not a cheaper, less painful way of clearing the eye brush than a $10 threading by Kitu.

Best Vintage Store

Recollections Antiques & Collectibles

Ahh, that awkward age: too young to be an antique, too old for the shelves of Target or Kmart. But for lovers of the late vintage years -- roughly beginning in the 1950s and running somewhere to the early 1970s -- this is the primo epoch for furniture, appliances, clothes, and knickknacks. If you number among its aficionados, check out the plentiful but by no means cheap items at Recollections. During a recent visit, a ten-inch Philco solid-state TV, complete with '60s plastic knobs and molding, could be had for $50. Then there's the cream-colored, toaster-sized Telefunken radio for $150. For $65, round out your media set with one of those 45 rpm portable record players that were popular about the time the Beatles first toured America. For the more domestic-minded, how about a '50s-style pink bathroom sink for $125? And you wouldn't want to take a cruise through the post-JFK years without something in the ubiquitous color of the 1960s: turquoise. In this case, a hand-held Sunbeam mixmaster for $55.

Best Value on Las Olas

Free Buckets at Kilwin's Chocolate's

Happy hour at Cathode Ray, you say? Costs money. Two-for-one drinks at Shizen after midnight? Costs money. Egg breakfast at the Floridian? Costs money. What does not cost any money along the choicest stretch of restaurants, shops, and galleries in Broward County, dear reader? The stack of old ice cream buckets in the back of the chocolate boudoir that is Kilwin's. Past the $4 chocolate-covered Twinkies, the $7 pouches of chocolate-covered espresso beans, the $8-a-pound gummi bears, the no-really $23-a-pound chocolate-covered orange slices... there. Stacked dozens high. "Free Buckets. Great for Storage!" Spent tubs of Rum Raisin and Butter Pecan. Eff-Are-Ee-Ee Free. Oh, and: lids. Contain yourself, bargain-hunter.

Best Dive Shop

Lauderdale Diver

The Gulf Stream rushes across South Florida like a river beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. It acts as nature's very own pressure cleaner, pushing away the dirt and debris from the reefs and wildlife in the waters off Broward and Palm Beach counties. That makes South Florida, despite its overdevelopment, one of the world's most fabulous dive spots. Divers from all over travel here to see the life-cradling coral reefs that rest just below the water's surface. You can see it all for yourself with the help of the folks at Lauderdale Diver. This spacious dive shop, only minutes from Fort Lauderdale Beach, offers everything a beginning or experienced diver could need -- from bathing suits and Freestyle underwater watches to Aqua Lung regulators and Body Glove wet suits. What's more, Lauderdale Diver's PADI certification courses cater to the needs of busy Floridians. In addition to a traditional two-week diving certification class ($275), Lauderdale Diver offers a flexible nights-and-weekends class ($325) and a name-any-time-you-want private class ($395). Ask for Judith or Shelly, who can tell you about the magnificent underwater world you've been missing.

Best Shoe Store

Ermare

If Matisse, Lichtenstein, Monet, Stuart Davis, and any other artist you can think of who liked to recklessly splash color around decided to make women's shoes instead of painting canvases, their work would end up at Ermare. You've got your goldfish pumps, your garter snake open-toed slippers, your shin-high Wonder Woman boots, and a pair of shoes so thick with silk flowers that, as one browser put it, "You'll have bumblebees chasing you." You've got your rainbows, your pastels, your Crayola brights. You've got Jimmy Choos, Gianmarco Lorenzis, Ombelines, Sergio Rossis, and, yes, even some brands that you and I might have heard of before, like Yves Saint Laurent and Giorgio Armani. The shoes don't come cheap; the least expensive ones we saw in the Galleria store went for about $100, and those were on sale. But you don't need money. Just wander through, like you're looking at pictures at an exhibition.

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