Store Slips in Mickey After a Brief Exile

Mouse-eared pencils and Mulan dolls are back on the shelves near the Snoopy slippers at Virginia’s Gift Shop, just outside the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park gates in Buena Park.

The park’s new owner, Cedar Fair LLP of Sandusky, Ohio, had banished Disney knickknacks to Never Land. But officials now admit that was a goofy idea at the tradition-bound store.

Virginia Knott, who opened the shop during the Depression, chose the merchandise until her family sold the park last year. Eye-catching in a bright green pantsuit with red stripes, Knott, 85, stopped by for the shop’s recent reopening after renovations.

Still looking proprietary, she gave the new decor her blessing: “All new fixtures, new carpet--and everything matches!”

The shop’s fancier merchandise still reflects her taste, which runs to the cute, the ornate and the literal: shelf after shelf of Lladro figurines, dewy-looking Thomas Kincade landscapes titled “Petals of Hope,” $424 bald eagle figurines. “So lifelike,” a visitor panted, caressing an ebony-colored resin dog head with a protruding crimson tongue.

In the less expensive part of the store, Disney souvenirs are back by popular demand, said Bill Lentz, Knott’s merchandise director. At first under Cedar Fair, the shop had tried to focus solely on merchandise carrying the logo of Knott’s, or its mascot, the Peanuts cartoon dog Snoopy.

Virginia Knott could have told you that would never be enough. “I was always proud I could sell as much Disney as Snoopy here--maybe more,” she said. Her trick: underpricing that Anaheim park with the mouse. “I always took a fair markup, but no more.”