Mr Bulky Treats & Gifts

In there on March 24^th 2011. Very clean, everything appeared as fresh as you would expect. Clerk was very nice and helpful and offered for us to taste anything. Stated the store had been there more than 20 years which I could verify having been going there for the last 19.

Alas, the use for a store like this is waning with the addition of candy isles in most grocery stores nowadays, lined with all the popular choices in bagfuls. The accessibility of candy in hordes is no longer considered a luxury than it is a common offering, next to shampoo and magazine racks.
The whimsy of Mr Bulky’s colorful displays of candy — popular or cult-​followed, classic or newly invented, original or with nuts — is appealing to the child in all of us crying out for freedom. Jelly bean station and gummy bear corner and candy bar counter are seemingly, long forgotten whenever I wander inside from shopping around the most random mall in America (Ward Parkway) and find it most deserted except for the clerk doing his homework. I started a conversation with him and he told me it was always this ‘crowded’ and he always left work with his homework finished — and it made me sad.
Mr Bulky’s was like the TOYS.R.US of candy — the ultimate treat stop for us as kids with my sisters and brother. We’d run in unbridled, poking around each candy carefully deciding what we wanted with our dollars in change. And that night we’d have trouble sleeping from our visit to the candy store (the next best thing from Halloween) hopped up on sugar and loving life!
Although from the website, it appears to be going strong in other locations, it was the Ward Parkway Mr Bulky’s where my memories derived.
Last week I stopped in with my father and I thought it looked a little dirty to me, like the candy had been sitting in its containers for way too long, unsold, unwanted, and no longer fresh! I thought, maybe the wonder was a thing of the past.
That’s when my dad came up to me with two chocolate ice cubes (a candy he hadn’t seen in 20 years) and a package of chuckles (the DOTS of his generation). We paid for them and ate them outside on a bench and he talked about his memories with the candy as a kid — and something was salvaged for me while listening to him — that Mr Bulky’s wasn’t a dying thing so much as it was a gateway to childhood, and I don’t think that sort of thing gets old for people.