Goods & Services >>

• Best New Grocery Store
  Charles Ball Sun fresh
  Much well-deserved hype accompanied the opening of a certain long-awaited grocery store in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. With all due respect, though, the Charles Ball Sun Fresh — which opened on the 18th Street Expressway just north of Interstate 70 — gets our nod for the year's... More >>
• Best Concept in a Crap Economy
  Smash-N-Shatter
  Not long after Paul Brown was laid off, the frustrated software engineer threw a glass against his living-room wall. The relief that he felt was soon muted by the irksome task of cleaning up. Enter Smash-N-Shatter, which opened this past spring. It was hard to convince a landlord to lease the... More >>
• Best Gardening Store
  Soil Service Garden Center
  If you've bought a house this year, you know how frantic those first few months can be while, still full of idealism, you have energy to put your own personal stamp on the biggest purchase you'll ever make. That lawn would look so nice with a few perennials, and maybe you could make that patch... More >>
• Best Green Business
  Ripple Glass
  When Boulevard Brewing Company asked an environmental group to assess the beer maker's Earth-friendliness, one black mark made plant engineer Mike Utz feel guilty. The company was selling nearly 40 percent of its suds in the Kansas City area, and about 8 million of those empty bottles were going... More >>
• Best Non-Bottled Water
  ECO-Choice Natural Spring Water
  We know the dilemma: wanting to quaff pure spring water without swallowing enough leached plastic to turn into a Barbie doll. Now we can. Since Earth Day 2009, ECO-Choice Natural Spring Water, a product of Overland Park-based CRB Group Springwater LLC, has been pumping fresh spring water into a... More >>
• Best Urban Farmer (2 Comments)
  Steve Mann, Platte Prairie Farms
  Steve Mann is known as "the squash father." Part of that has to do with Mann's cultivation of the delectable yellow fruit at his Platte Prairie Farm in the Northland and his annual Squash Blossom Festival, a gathering of environmentalists and foodies. He's also building a political machine, a... More >>
• Best Place to Buy Phlox
  Missouri Prairie Foundation Plant Sale
  Before Europeans arrived, with their muskets and boomboxes, much of Missouri was prairie. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of this ecosystem remains, according to the Missouri Prairie Foundation, which aspires to restore native grasslands lost to agriculture and sprawl. Each spring, the... More >>
• Best Veterinary Tech
  Jan Winner
  A 20-minute car ride was pushing it, but the cat needed a test by the veterinary oncologist at VSEC. Words of encouragement — "It's OK. We're almost there" — didn't ease the cat's nerves. After exiting the highway, with only five minutes to go, his incessant meowing turned to a... More >>
• Best Mom-and-Pop Business
  Twisted Sister
  This is Hallmark country, which is all well and good when it's time to send Grandma a card or buy Junior a teddy bear. But the king of card sellers leaves those of us who appreciate a good dirty joke woefully underserved. Enter Ted and Cindy Larkin, unabashed purveyors of silly smut at Twisted... More >>
• Best Bike Shop
  Epic Bike and Sport
  Bike shops can be intimidating. They're showrooms of expensive merchandise — and clothing that looks good on 1 percent of the population — and the ultrafit salespeople are clearly pondering the 50-mile training ride they'll breeze through like an evening appetizer as soon as they... More >>
• Best Yoga Studio
  New Day Yoga
  New Day Yoga looks out of place in Overland Park. Down a tree-lined street, away from the strip malls and the streaming traffic, the weathered building looks like an old general store or a cozy antique shop that has withstood the surrounding tsunami of big-box retail. Inside, New Day's two... More >>
• Best New Business (1 Comment)
  Blue Star Motorcycles
  Yeah, Troost Avenue has a bad reputation. It's a loud, untamed, misunderstood stretch of road. So what better location is there for a motorcycle repair shop? The rebels running Blue Star Motorcycles — Ross Thompson, Woody McGrain and Steve Browning — had the same thought when they... More >>
• Best Auto Service
  Northtown Auto
  Since 1986, Ted and Russell Phillips and their crew of trusty mechanics at Northtown Auto have been installing shocks and struts, aligning wheels, rebuilding starters and alternators, and repairing electrical systems in imported and domestic vehicles in every make and year and model. In the... More >>
• Best Tire Repair
  Boulevard Tires
  At Boulevard Tires, the jumpsuit-clad mechanics are happy to lead a customer past the greasy plastic curtain that separates the waiting room from the garage. There, they'll submerge a flat tire in a vat of water to locate whatever nail, slow leak or pothole puncture set the customer a-walking.... More >>
• Best Museum Gift Shop
  Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
  Origami cranes to dangle from your ears, pretty puppy piggy banks, flatware with zippers, teapots with ridges, a tiny sink that drips blue paperclips — such are the delights in the gift shop at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Best of all, though, are the books — shelf upon shelf... More >>
• Best Cosmetics Saleswoman
  Carolyn Yates
  For lipsticks, moisturizers, toners and blush, you've got the Targets, Walgreens and Body Shops. If you have allergies or a fatter billfold, there are the higher-end options at department stores — along with helpful but often hard-sell counterwomen. But if you buy Clarins at the Prairie... More >>
• Best Jingle (4 Comments)
  Shawnee Mission Hyundai
  A good jingle is like a flame-licked brand, able to sear the name of a good or a service on the fleshy part of the brain cortex. (Who among us hasn't hummed or sung at least a verse of the Bob Hamilton Plumbing, Heating and A/C jingle?) The commercial ditty that gets our hearts pumping —... More >>
• Best Reason for Johnson Countians Not to Drive to Midtown
  Mission Farms
  With its blend of retail shops, condos and office space, Leawood's Mission Farms development is a perfect example of suburban New Urbanism — it actually promotes itself as an "exciting urban development," even though it's as suburban as it can get without being south of Interstate 435.... More >>
• Best Nonprofit
  Midwest Music Foundation
  In July 2008, when area musician Abigail Henderson was diagnosed with Stage III inflammatory breast cancer, her hope for survival was about as good as the U.S. health-care system getting fixed. Sixteen months of treatments and a White House regime change later, Henderson is not only free of the... More >>
• Best Homegrown Product
  Smith Newton
  Go ahead, buy that Coke and that bag of Doritos. What expands the waistline may at least help the planet a little. In July, Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay took delivery of the Smith Newton, the largest road-going electric truck in North America. Powered by lithium ion batteries and a 120-kilowatt... More >>
• Best Ethnic Grocery Store
  Bonito Michoacan
  The fact that the new Sun Fresh just off Interstate 70 houses a tortillería doesn't just make the Minutemen weep. It suggests that the traditional groceries and carnicerías of Kansas City, Kansas, at last face some competition from the big stores. That shouldn't worry the patrons... More >>