What it’s actually like
Old Town Scottsdale is not short of places to spend money on an adult, and it is remarkably short of places that make a seven-year-old happy for five dollars. Old Town Candy & Toys is the exception. It sits on Scottsdale Road in the middle of the district, and inside it is exactly what the name promises and nothing cleverer: walls of candy in open baskets and bins, a counter of the theater-box brands, and a back stretch of toys chosen by someone who clearly remembers being a kid.
Steve and Jeanine Rometty opened it in 2011. Steve grew up in Michigan being taken to old-fashioned candy stores by his parents, and years later a shop in Old Town San Diego reminded him what that felt like, and that Scottsdale’s Old Town did not have one. So he and Jeanine built it. The bins — 144 of them, by the store’s own count — are the mix-and-match heart of the place: you take a bag, fill it with whatever combination of wax bottles, taffy, gummies and long-lost brands you like, and pay by weight.
The atmosphere is the point. Nothing is curated in the boutique sense; the shop is deliberately overstuffed and a little chaotic, which is how the candy stores of everyone’s childhood were. Grandparents do as well here as children. It is also, quietly, one of the more useful doors in downtown for anyone with a family in tow, because the rest of the block is bars, galleries and boutiques that would rather a kid not touch anything.
What to buy
The scorpion lollipop. A clear hard-candy pop with a real, edible scorpion suspended inside. It is the item people carry home to prove they went to the desert, and it is the most Arizona souvenir sold for pocket change anywhere in Old Town.
A mix-and-match bag from the bins. The 144 baskets are the reason to come. Build a bag of what you ate in 1985 and let a kid build the one they will remember in 2050.
Theater-box candy. The full row of movie-counter boxes, which is a cheap way to make a hotel-room movie night feel like an occasion.
A real toy. Classic books, science kits, jigsaw puzzles and stuffed animals rather than licensed plastic, which makes this a better gift stop than a candy store has any obligation to be.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop is on Scottsdale Road, where street parking is the worst in the district. Use the free public garage at the Civic Center off Drinkwater Boulevard, or the lots on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal, and walk; the Old Town on foot note maps the loop and the Old Town guide covers the rest. Ride-share drop-offs on Scottsdale Road itself are miserable on weekends, so name a cross street.
Timing is about children, not crowds. Mornings are calm and the bins are freshly stocked. Weekend afternoons in high season, roughly January through April, bring the snowbird grandparents and the spring-training families, and the aisles get tight. In summer it is a cool refuge between the morning and evening hours that are the only sensible times to be outdoors downtown. The Saturday Old Town Farmers Market is a natural pairing for a family morning: produce and tamales first, candy as the bribe.
Eat while you’re there
Daily Dose is a few doors along the same block and is the obvious breakfast or brunch before the candy. The Sugar Bowl, pink since 1958 at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue, is the ice-cream parlor that completes the sugar theme of the outing. Diego Pops up Scottsdale Road does a bright, kid-tolerant Mexican lunch, and Los Olivos on 2nd Street has been feeding downtown families since 1947.
How it got here
Scottsdale has always sold sweetness to visitors; the Sugar Bowl has been doing it in pink since 1958, and the Fifth Avenue shops sold the resort-town version of it to winter residents for decades. What downtown did not have, by the 2010s, was a real candy store. The district had spent twenty years tilting toward bars and clubs, the Entertainment District east of Scottsdale Road was at full volume, and the family-facing end of Old Town — the Western storefronts, the Mission, the souvenir shops on Brown Avenue — was thinner than it had once been.
Steve and Jeanine Rometty saw the gap from the outside. Steve’s template was the candy stores his parents took him to as a boy in Michigan, the kind with jars along the wall and a scoop in every one, and the trigger was a candy store in Old Town San Diego, a historic tourist district that is in many ways Scottsdale’s West Coast cousin. If San Diego’s old town could support one, Scottsdale’s could. In 2011 they opened Old Town Candy & Toys on Scottsdale Road, in the stretch of the district where the tourist foot traffic is heaviest and the family-friendly options were fewest.
The formula was deliberately old-fashioned. Rather than a boutique of artisan chocolate, they built a bin store: 144 baskets and bins of the mass-market retro candy that adults recognize and children want, sold by weight, plus theater boxes and novelties. The scorpion lollipop was the stroke of local genius, a Sonoran Desert souvenir in a form a nine-year-old will actually carry home. The toy side went the same direction, toward books, science kits, puzzles and stuffed animals rather than whatever franchise was on television that season.
More than a decade on, the store is one of the anchors of the family layer of Old Town, the version of the district that runs on breakfast at Daily Dose, a walk past the Mission and a bag of candy for the drive home. Downtown Scottsdale’s shopping has grown steadily more expensive, from Fashion Square down to the galleries on Main Street. It says something that one of the most reliably busy doors on Scottsdale Road is the one where the average sale is a few dollars and a scorpion.