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My friend Michelle Rutkowski, retail queen of the Wildwoods Boardwalk, had a problem. She has the two of the niftiest variety stores on the Boards, but so far this season sales weren’t exactly going through the roof, even though she was doing OK.
Trouble was, she’d promised her mom, Kathy, and her 7-year-old daughter, Sylvia, a trip to Japan this summer to visit her brother, Mitchell, who is in a doctorate research program in physics there, and the bucks just weren’t there for the trip — up until a couple of weeks ago.
Michelle chalks up the answer to the Man Upstairs. “I’m a good person,” she said last week during a lull in her North Wildwood store. “I try to help people. And as I was laying in bed thinking about how I was going to do it, the answer came to me.”
The answer was the World Cup soccer tournament, which was the biggest thing in sports then, and the unending, nerve-wracking, deafening cacophony of the vuvuzelas, the African horns, that were so loud and persistent throughout the games that the TV networks had to install bigger and better noise filters, so that their announcers could be heard over the din.
Vuvuzela is a South African term for stadium horn, but Michelle’s brainstorm was to make it a Boardwalk horn. And, as fortune would have it, one of Wildwood’s beach soccer weekends was coming up and the town would be filled with young soccer freaks and their purse-string parents. Yummy. A made-to-order market.
It took Michelle exactly one phone call to hook up a supply of red, green, or blue plastic vuvuzelas that she could retail for the fast-mover price of $5. She is very loyal to her suppliers and doesn’t try to work them over for an extra 25 cents every time she gets a chance, and they appreciate this civilized buying behavior and reciprocate her loyalty. Michelle is about as big as a minute, with a rat-tat-tat voice that sounds like a cross between Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich.
Anyhow, the supplier she called was fresh out of vuvuzelas, but steered her to some people who were literally making the horns in their garage, one batch at a time. She hooked up with them and the vuvuzela pipeline opened.
Having the noisy horns is one thing, but selling them is a horn of a different color. So Michelle took the bull by the horns – literally — and stationed herself outside on the Boardwalk, and, like Lauren Bacall told Bogie in “Key Largo,” “Just pucker up your lips and blow.”
So blow she did, and blow also did most of the kids working for her – mainly Eastern Europeans that she employs by the score – and soon the sea air was fill with the noisome prolonged “WAHHH! WAHHH!” quack of the vuvuzelas. And soon it got even noisier on the Boardwalk as the horns began to fly out of her stores like the proverbial hotcakes (horncakes?) Half the soccer kids in town were honking away like mad geese.
“People were coming in and buying three, four, five, at a time,” she said. “And after that first day, one of the guys showed up for work with big bruises all around his mouth. I said, ‘What happened to you? Did you get in a fight?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I gave 100 percent for you.’ He blew so long and hard on the horn out on the Boardwalk that he got all those bruises. Jeez!”
Other Boardwalk vendors were late getting any of the horns — if at all — and they ended up having to charge $8 a copy, so Michelle had the price market to herself.
“They probably think I’m a genius,” she said, trying hard not to gloat.
When the smoke cleared, she had moved 4,000 vuvuzelas and as you read this, her mom and daughter are no doubt eating sushi in Tokyo.
