Metro Pulse/Citybeat

Comment
on this story

Seven Days

Wednesday, January 1
Former assistant chief jailer Keith Lyon is reinstated at the Knox County Sheriff's office a year after he resigned because so many of his peers complained about him. Maybe it took him that long to get through the Dale Carnegie course "How to Win Friends and Influence Deputies."

Thursday, January 2
Much of Knoxville returns to work after the Christmas holidays. We use the term "work" loosely here, at least until after the upcoming weekend.

Friday, January 3
The News-Sentinel reports that Gov. Don Sundquist has granted clemency to seven people for past crimes during the past few weeks. Republican critics of former President Clinton's last-minute pardons are strangely quiet...or quietly strange. Ray Blanton takes a couple spins in his grave.

Saturday, January 4
Former Webb School quarterback Chad Pennington's New York Jets humiliate former Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning's Indianapolis Colts 41-0 in a playoff game. No. 16 jerseys are burned in two colors—orange and blue, and Florida Coach Ron Zook complains of the coincidence, because he's run out of other things to complain about.

Monday, January 6
Gov.-elect Phil Bredesen appoints business lobbyist Dave Goetz to be Finance Commissioner, elevating the former television reporter to the second-highest position in the state and shocking everyone in the process (including Goetz). Talking heads across the state polish off their resumes and dream of landing the Labor Commissioner's job.

Tuesday, January 7
Joe Hultquist is the only City Council member to vote against a $1.8 million contract to design a $17.5 million downtown transit center. Hultquist says that's because he didn't get a copy of the 206-page packet until the night before the vote. The mayor inserts an item for a speed-reading course for Council in the upcoming budget...

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
We don't know its origin, and as our winner wrote, "it seems very out of place." Nonetheless, the terra cotta relief sculpture in last week's Knoxville Found photo is on one of the stone gateposts to the Lord Lindsey parking lot on Henley Street. Jenny Huskey of Knoxville, who spends time stuck in traffic on Henley every day, correctly identified this curiosity (and a good thing, too, because Jenny was our only respondent). In honor of Jenny's sharp eye, we award her with The Secret of Shambala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight. Said book is brought to you by James Redfield, author of The Tenth Insight and The Celestine Prophecy, hoping the insight will keep her vision sharp. By the way, and apropos of nothing, really, it's a sharp writer who writes a book that supposedly contained the insights one needs to live by (i.e., the nine in The Celestine Prophecy), and, when said book happens to become a bestseller, said writer realizes there are more insights to sell, er, discover.

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
Thursday, Jan. 9
1:30 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
On the agenda are consideration of amendments to add Neighborhood Commercial, Rural Commercial, and Employment Center districts to the Knox County Zoning Ordinance and requests to place the 5th Ave. Hotel and the old downtown post office building under H-1 overlays.

POLICE ADVISORY & REVIEW QUARTERLY MEETING
Thursday, Jan 16
6 p.m.
Pellissippi State Technical Community College
1610 Magnolia Ave.
Regular meeting.

Beanie Babies and Mr. Fox
Emery 5 & 10 thrives despite demise of the variety store

A decade ago, Ron Emery felt like a fool, and a poor fool at that. He had inherited his family's business, a variety store on Chapman Highway called Emery 5 & 10. The business, started in 1927, once consisted of a chain of stores stretching across the Southeast. But the chain ebbed away along with the variety store concept, which was destroyed when grocery stores began selling things other than food and when discount superstores such as K-Mart began to appear.

For some reason, Ron Emery hadn't noticed that variety stores didn't work anymore, or at least he pretended that still believed in the concept. Then came the early 1990s.

"I was insolvent," he says. "I had borrowed to the hilt and couldn't afford to make payments on my loans."

By 1993, Emery was ready to give up; he was making plans to sell his inventory and get another job. Then a stranger came into the store and became intrigued with the place. The man, Kenny Fox, was the owner of a fading chain based in Charleston, S.C. called Edwards Variety Stores. Fox was so excited that there was still a variety store in Knoxville that he treated Emery like a long-lost cousin.

"He came in and just loved this place and everything about it, but when I told him that I was about to shut it down he got really upset with me," Emery says. "He then spent the next three hours chasing me around the store trying to talk me out of selling it."

Fox succeeded. Emery rolled up his sleeves and spent the next several months trying to come up with some products that would sell. Rather than continuing to focus on the requisites and everyday household items that had been the staple of the variety store, Emery began attending trade shows with an eye for things new and different. Whenever he saw one he would try to become the only retailer, or one of the only retailers, in Knoxville to sell it.

A couple of years later, a salesman dropped by the Emery 5 & 10 with a new type of stuffed animal called a Beanie Baby. The first time the guy came by, Emery said he couldn't afford to pay the $100 necessary to carry a full line of Beanie Baby products, so the salesman left without a contract in hand. A few months later, Emery ran into the Beanie Baby salesman at a trade show and told him he changed his mind. "How I ran into him, I'll never know," Emery says.

A few months later, in the middle of the Christmas season, word got out around Knoxville that Beanie Babies could be purchased at the Emery 5 & 10. "It was huge," Emery said. "We sold out, and then sold out again, and the next thing I knew, whenever we would get in a shipment, we'd have a line of people ready to buy them."

Beanie Babies and the visitor from Charleston, S.C. are two of the reasons that the Emery 5 & 10 has survived the last decade at 4014 Chapman Highway, a strip mall location that also includes a Family Dollar next door and a Big Lots out back. Today, the store's merchandise has little resemblance to that of an old-fashioned variety store, which carried the types of products that you now find in most drug stores like CVS and Revco. Emery 5 & 10 is a cross between an upscale gift boutique, a knick-knack retailer, and a mom and pop hardware store (the store possesses a True Value franchise). The Emery 5 & 10 may be the smallest retail space in Tennessee where a person can buy light bulbs, wind-up metal toys, incense, sewing thread, cast iron cookware, and "earth friendly" grooming products under the same roof.

"I bring things in that no one else has and try to stock what sells," Emery says.

Emery says that the hardware side of the store is marginally profitable. But the real home runs in recent years have come from specialty items—things, like Beanie Babies, that are too new and niche-oriented to be carried by mega chains such as Walgreen across the street.

During the last 10 years, Emery 5 & 10 has experimented with dozens of specialized product lines, which range from Wild Berry Incense to Lodge Cast Iron Cookware to Burt's Bees Earth Friendly Natural Personal Care Products. Emery heard about virtually every one of them from retailers in other cities or at trade shows. The two hot lines this year, Emery says, were candles produced by the Yankee Candle Co. and modular charm bracelets that are produced in Italy by a firm called Zoppini. "These charm bracelets have been huge ever since Brittany Spears' sister went on the MTV Awards wearing them," says Emery, a Vietnam veteran doesn't strike you as the kind of person who would be watching the MTV Awards.

Today, Emery says business is great. Revenue went up by more than ten percent last year—an impressive performance in a year when many retailers lost money or were flat. With the addition of more specialty product lines and the expansion of the hardware store to include equipment rentals, Emery hopes that the store will continue to grow as a destination rather than one that caters to people who happen to drive by. Meanwhile, there are a few tangible signs that Emery was once a traditional variety store: its name (5 & 10), a few photographs of old Emery locations from the 1930s, and the practice of being closed on Sundays, except in December. "I know that True Value has told me that I need to be open on Sundays to compete with Home Depot, but I'm not going to do that," he says. "By giving everyone Sunday off, I get better employees. If I was open on Sunday, I'd have the high school crew working in here, and they might run my customers off."

Emery says he is eternally grateful to both God—"it's his store; I'm only the caretaker," he says—and to Charleston retailer Kenny Fox for the fact that he still runs his business. Unfortunately, Emery said he hadn't tracked down Fox lately. Metro Pulse did, finding out in the process that Fox closed his store three years ago and has since torn it down to build a condo development on the site. "I'm glad I'm out of retail," says Fox, whose family used to own another variety store chain in Nashville called Kuhn's Big K. "It was getting tough to compete and tough to find merchandise. But I'm really glad that Emery has found a niche and is doing well."

The news that Fox had closed his store came as a bit of a shock to Emery. "Isn't that something?" he said, laughing. "He should have called me. I'd have gone down there and talked him out of it."

—Bill Carey

Clearer Picture
2003 may be the year TV gets high definition

High definition television (HDTV), with its much sharper pictures than regular TV sets, has been heralded as the wave of the viewing future for years. But up to now it's remained little more than a novelty.

Several developments are converging, though, that could make 2003 the year HDTV starts flourishing in the Knoxville area.

For one, Comcast began in December offering HDTV service to its more than 100,000 cable subscribers in Knoxville. Since fewer than 20 percent of Knoxvillians get their television signals over the air, that means the HDTV programming offered by the broadcast networks is now accessible by the vast majority of viewers.

At the same time, the networks are expanding their HDTV offerings. In November, NBC (through its local affiliate WBIR) nearly doubled its HDTV programming. Now, more than half of its prime time shows plus Jay Leno's Tonight show are available in HDTV format, according to WBIR's program operations director David Cowen.

ABC and its local affiliate WATE aren't far behind, and CBS's local affiliate WVLT is due to begin broadcasting its HDTV offerings upon the anticipated April completion of a transmission tower. (WBIR and WATE share a tower that went live last May.) Fox, meanwhile, is nowhere on the radar screen at present.

Moreover, the price of HDTV sets needed to receive the programming continues to fall. According to Michael Edelblut at Now Audio Video, a set with a 50-inch screen that cost $5,000 three years ago now goes for $1,999—not that much more than the $1,600 price of a regular TV set of the same size. For a 27-inch screen (the smallest HDTV set on the market), the $750 price tag compares to $600 for the same sized regular TV, Edelbult says.

He estimates that 70 percent of Now Audio Video's big screen sales are now HDTV, up from less than 50 percent a year ago and heading higher. "Analog [regular] sets are pretty soon going to be obsolete except for the low end of the market," he claims.

As with just about every other sector of the telecommunications market, conversion from analog to digital transmission is a driving force behind the change. Where analog broadcast pictures in the United States have 525 scan lines per image, a digital picture can have 720 or 1,080 depending on the format. Most HDTV signals are at the high end and also refresh the picture twice as frequently. The result is much higher resolution on the screen.

"Some people have said it's more like looking out a window than looking at a TV screen," says Cohen. But WBIR general manager, Jeff Lee, adds that, "the differences are much more noticeable in an outdoor setting, movies, sports events than watching a sitcom or a soap opera."

According to Comcast's vice president for public and governmental affairs, Russell Byrd, the cable company has spent $75 million upgrading its network here to support high speed Internet access, digital cable service with many additional channels, and now HDTV. Its HDTV service costs $5 per month and requires the installation of a different set-top box than the ones that support analog and digital TV services.

In addition to the growing amount of network programming, subscribers to HBO and Showtime get mostly HDTV programming on these channels, and other cable channels—starting with the Discovery channel in March—are gearing up to offer it as well.

Nobody knows how many TV sets in the Knoxville area are capable of receiving it at this time, but guesses range from as low as one percent to as high as five percent. Byrd believes that percentage will grow exponentially over the next three years. "With more programming and more channels, I think by 2006 the vast majority of viewers will have HDTV," he says.

That happens to be the year that current federal law calls for broadcasters to change over all their programming to HDTV on the new channels that the Federal Communications Commission awarded them for this purpose (Channel 26 for WATE, Channel 30 for WVLT, Channel 31 for WBIR, Channel 34 for WTNZ and Channel 17 for public television). Once this conversion takes place, their analog channels would be reclaimed by the FCC for relocation, and remaining owners of analog TV sets would have to get an altogether different set-top box to convert over-the-air signals from digital to analog. But this timetable is likely to be delayed unless Byrd's prediction is fulfilled in spades.

—Joe Sullivan