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Best Amenity at a Supermarket

Gas stations at King Soopers

You thought the ATM next to the checkout was convenient. Now you can fill up on your way out of the parking lot at King Soopers and City Market locations across the state. Parent company Kroger has been pumping petroleum products from mini-convenience stores since 1998; the metro Denver area now has eight locations. Use your Sooper Card for a three-cent-per-gallon discount, too.

Best ATM Drive-Through

Compass Bank

Not only is Compass building goodwill with ATM users by not soaking them for fees (even if they aren't Compass customers!), but they tend to offer more pleasant surroundings for the cash-hungry on the move. This drive-through is well-designed, clean, well-lit and nicely landscaped. If only they'd plant a money tree, it would be ideal.

Best Custom Rugs

Allure Custom Rugs

Anyone who's shopped for floor coverings recently knows they usually come in two types: the wrong color that fits your space perfectly, or the perfect pattern that's only two feet too wide for your room. You can find the third type -- exactly what you want in exactly the size you need -- at Allure Custom Rugs. For more than a dozen years, owner Avner Giladi and his artisans have been transforming individual designs into custom rugs. The carpets, available only through interior designers, take about two months to create and are never of the fourth type: cheap. Most cost between $40 and $90 per square foot, depending on the design. The rest of us can watch the rugs take shape with a tour of the Allure factory; call for an appointment.

Best Staircases

StairMeister Log Works

Step up to a custom look in your little log cabin with a handcrafted spiral or curved stairway from StairMeister, a Boulder company that has carved out a niche business by offering replacement stairways for the standard steps included in most log-home kits. Tad and Kimberly Horning's shop off U.S. 36 turns out the designer staircases, which run between $3,000 and $20,000, for delivery to all fifty states.

Best Cheap Home-Improvement Items

Bud's Warehouse

Denver's Home Improvement Thrift Store is a fabulous community resource on many levels. It recycles usable building materials not accepted by regular thrift stores, so it's good for the environment. It sells building materials (everything including the kitchen sink) for up to 70 percent less than even big-box discounters, so it's good for your remodeling budget. Bud's Warehouse also provides job-training opportunities for individuals struggling with drug and alcohol addiction or prison records, employing the formerly unemployable and helping them get on with life, so it's good for society, too. Stop by the warehouse, in the historic 1881 Colorado Ironworks building (five blocks north of Coors Field), and say hi to Bud.

Best Tool Service

Schlosser Tool & Machinery Co.

A sharp tool is a safe tool. The guys at Schlosser Tool & Machinery have been keeping Denver woodworkers sawing safely for more than half a century. Bring your old hand blades -- saws, chisels, augers, anything but power tools -- to the service department and get them spiffed up for a whole new lifetime of service. It's a sharp idea.

Best Mop Shop

Eze Mop Co.

Back when Denver really was a dusty old cowtown, the Jurenka clan came to town to clean up -- or at least give its good citizens the tools to do it. You might think that the venerable Eze Mop Company hasn't changed much since its founding more than fifty years ago, but you're wrong, pard. Second-generation owner David Jurenka can sell you any kind of brush, scrubber, duster, broom or mop known to man, including the one he makes himself, the eponymous Eze Mop. He has pails and cleaning products, too, as well as washtubs, cloths and anything else you need to keep your space spotless.

Best Place to Buy a Parking Meter

Antique Center on Broadway

Ka-ching! Now that the city's cramming parking meters along every possible inch of asphalt downtown, why not cut yourself in on the action? A batch of Denver's old, obsolete parking meters have found quarter at Mike Kaplan's booth in the Antique Center. Fork over $22.50 and one of them can be yours -- ready to plant in front of your office or your home, or to take with you so that you can transform a "loading only" spot into a metered mecca whenever the need arises.

Best New Use for the Old DIA Toll Plaza

Parking

It may be one of the first airport amenities specifically designed for cell-phone users: In light of the security changes at Denver International Airport that eliminated the 45-minute free parking spots in the passenger pickup area, airport officials have designated the old toll-plaza area (torn down last year when the booths were relocated closer to the airport) as a new free 45-minute parking lot. (Of course, people have been using the area illegally for a while, despite signs that warn motorists against stopping.) Since the seventy-space lot is four miles from the terminal, however, arriving passengers have to use their cell phones -- or a pay phone -- to call friends, relatives or associates who are waiting in the lot with their cell phones. Still, it's a creative, and helpful, use for the old space. Ring up a winner.

Best Denver Invention That Immobilized the World

The Denver Boot

Back in the early '50s, some Denver cops were bemoaning the problems involved with towing cars -- and an inventor friend, Frank Marugg, shouldered the task of coming up with a better way to handle parking scofflaws. Enter the Denver Boot, the now-notorious clamp that paralyzes the front tire of an offending auto until its owner pays up (or gives up on the car altogether). Although Denver was the first city to use Marugg's masterpiece, it's since spread around the world.

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