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It was time for a storybook ending.

That's because tales of folly and plunder - even in a business as civilized as gourmet kitchen stores - are a dime a dozen. And dropping.

What's your pleasure, if that's the correct word? Tobacco USA, a seemingly rock-solid business owned by the Pappas family, moves from a sow's-ear retail location next to the Coliseum to a silk-purse spot near Starmount Country Club, and changes its name to West Market Gourmet, with plans to expand.

Two months later? It goes out of business.

Even stranger? The store that was originally supposed to move into that upscale location was Deep Roots Market, in a what-were-they-thinking $1 million miscalculation. The 2001 move that never happened saddled the cramped organic co-op on Spring Garden with a debt paid off only 18 months ago.

Meanwhile, just in time for the economy to fall flatter than a soufflé when you slam the oven door, not one, but two, national gourmet chains opened in the shops near the Trump Taj Mahal Teeter that replaced the Super Teeter on Friendly.

The gourmet stores, Williams-Sonoma and Sur la Table, will satisfy our endless appetite for winter in the Alps, for lemon zest, for $999 piano-black espresso machines, and the pretense that we live in Chevy Chase or Malibu or Telluride. Or wherever. Someplace where the jobless rate didn't hit 9 percent by Christmas.

But it really did smell good on Friday in Williams-Sonoma, where the demonstration of the day was pulled pork, made with a sauce from the "Food Hall" (that's different from a food bank) in a slow cooker (not to be confused with a crockpot).

"Oh, it's great working here," a helpful sales clerk was saying Friday behind the big gas range at the ultimate, awesome, pricey kitchen store.

"Except you're broke all the time because there's always something you have to buy, and you gain weight because you're always eating."

That did it. This called for a storybook ending. A way off this merry-go-round. This primal urge to fly, like Icarus, too high, too close to the sun. Melting our wax wings. Not to mention, our Visas and MasterCards.

Yet if even our slow-food neighbors at Deep Roots caught the bug, was anyone immune? That's when I remembered Art and Martha. Of course! The Extra Ingredient.

Once upon a time, they were this cute young couple, the Nadings, newly married, Art an MBA struggling through the Babcock School at Wake Forest ("Work Forest," he called it), Martha studying fashion merchandising at UNCG. In the early '80s, Art was a section chief, briefly, at AT&T before the big downsize, when the term "downsize" was first coined.

Art and Martha hatched a plan. They loved to cook. They loved kitchen gadgets. They saw a niche, drew up a business plan, sank their money in, and with an 11-month-old baby on one hip, opened a gourmet shop at Friendly Center in 1985.

So Friday morning as I left Williams-Sonoma, feeling hungry but a little sick from the smell of the pulled pork, I was afraid to find out. What if, as at West Market Gourmet, the sign at Extra Ingredient wasn't good?

Actually, it was the old chalk board, in familiar handwriting: "Family-owned at Friendly Center for 25 years." But Martha has gray hair now. So does Art. The 11-month-old is 26, and is in the housewares business. They opened a second store in Myrtle Beach, which did well, but they felt overextended, driving too far.

The Nadings adapted. They went online, of course. And had to compete, with everyone from Roosters to Target to TV's Sham-Wow-Slap-Chop guy. But they're small. They know their customers. They turn on a dime.

"We're a local business. We fed our family. It's fun," Martha says. "This will be a boring story if you quote me."

"Boring" is a loaded word. I like "storybook." And what I really like is this "corn butterer" gadget.

"You know how it slides all over the place?" manager Sue Chilton says. "This solves the problem."

Business 101. Know what the customer needs. For the moment, it's likely to be bread and butter.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn @news-record.com