[URBAN NOTE] "David Mirvish looks back at all those Honest Ed’s memories"

[rfmcdonald]

Toronto Star business reporter Francine Kopun interviews David Mirvish, son of Honest Ed's founder, about his family's memories of this shopping institution.

He was a dreamer and his store was the dream.

After dinner at home, served at precisely 6 p.m. by his wife, after the dishes were cleared, Edwin Mirvish would sit at the table writing slogans — “Honest Ed’s is for the birds, cheap, cheap, cheap” — and as he pushed down on the pen with a new idea it would carve itself into the dining room tabletop.

Forty clowns playing trombones, roller derbies, dance contests, free turkeys for free publicity. People had to line up for those turkeys and the queue snaked through the store, across three floors of tchotchkes, kitchenwares, clothing, boots, toys. Buy low, sell cheap, but to thousands of people.

On weekends the streets around Bloor and Bathurst were choked with so much traffic that drivers would get out of their cars and into fistfights.

The neighbours complained. The store was too brash, too bright, too noisy.

Honest Ed was pulling in $14 million a year — in 1968.

“My father didn’t want to be dependent on one fancy client, he’d rather make a little bit of money from each sale,” said his son David Mirvish, in an interview with the Star ahead of the store’s closing on Dec. 31.