Pryde’s Offers Kitchenware Shoppers Old-Time Customer Service

By Robin Mather

Tucked into a tree-filled neighborhood called Old Westport in Kansas City, Kansas, Pryde’s Kitchen & Necessities is a wonderland for the curious cook.

Its fans say things like, “The store is clean and the displays are beautiful and never messy, and you can tell the employees love working there,” and “So much stuff, it almost feels like a hoarder’s paradise.” Owner Louise Meyers says tour buses visit the store, filled with tourists who have come from far away to the store they know as a mecca for the kitchen-obsessed. “Forty percent of our customers come from out of town,” she says. “They say, ‘It isn’t Christmas until you’ve been to Pryde’s.’ ”

The store’s floors are jam-packed with gadgets, linens, pots and pans, specialty cookware, coffee, and tea pots and accessories and more. Pryde’s offers the largest selection of Homer Laughlin Fiestaware in the Midwest, says Meyers, and she’s also obviously proud of the large selection of thick maple cutting boards made by a Missouri company called C & C Woodworks.

One whole room is devoted to shelf after shelf of cake plates and baking supplies, including everything from rolling pins to cake pop pans. Pryde’s also is known for its large offering of the highly prized Mosser Glass items, including jadeite and colored milk glass serveware. The store, while crammed with merchandise – it even hangs from the ceilings – is carefully curated and artfully arranged, and staff can lead you quickly and easily to glassware, or mugs, or dessert plate sets, or whatever it is that your heart desires.

The new cook who shops at Pryde’s will get the same reassuring assistance, and guidance to the best-quality item she’s looking for, as the long-time customer who is a confident cook and needs an unusual item. Both will return again and again to Pryde’s for its high-quality merchandise, but also, one suspects, for the congenial sales staff, and maybe the complimentary tea or coffee offered to shoppers while they prowl the store.

Amazingly, Pryde’s is not computerized in any way. Staff people still hand-write receipts, and Meyers says she carries the inventory of hundreds of thousands of items in her head. She works on the floor of the store every day, and tracks inventory that way, she says.

“I didn’t want to get into a situation where I was spending all my time at a desk, staring at a computer,” she says. “And oddly enough, this works fine for me.”