In the Leavenworth Echo, Kayla Applebay described tourists who wander into her cider taproom once and then keep coming back every day of their trip, saying, "We end up calling them mini locals." The bartenders start extending them the same discount they give year-round residents.
That's not a marketing line. It's how Applebay actually runs Bushel & Bee Taproom, the cider and beer bar she opened on Front Street after asking a simple question while wine tasting with her sister back in 2016: was there anywhere in town to get a good cider? There wasn't. So she built one, and in doing so offers an example of a business that welcomes repeat visitors alongside local customers.
Leavenworth is known for its Bavarian facades, Oktoberfest crowds and Highway 2 access. Alongside its visitor appeal, the town has businesses that serve local customers throughout the year. The examples below show how some businesses combine visitor traffic with services and activities that bring local customers back.
A Discount Card as a Business Strategy
Bushel & Bee sits at 900 Front Street, technically in the thick of the tourist corridor. But walk in on a Tuesday afternoon and the room reads less like a destination stop and more like what the shop's own site calls "the community's living room." Dogs are welcome. The draft list rotates through two dozen ciders, meads and beers sourced with the same hyper-focus Applebay brought to teaching herself how to write a business plan, a skill she credits partly to refusing to wait until she felt qualified.
What makes the place worth understanding, though, isn't the drink list. It's the locals discount, and the fact that her staff hands it out to visitors who show up enough times in a single trip to earn "mini local" status. Applebay has said winning that kind of tourist loyalty matters as much to her as anything else the business does. The bar welcomes tourists and locals alike, and repeat visitors can receive the locals discount.
That approach helps illustrate how a business can serve visitors while becoming part of local routines.
The Boutique That Opened With a Book Club
A newer example sits four blocks away. As the Leavenworth Echo reported, Alpenglö Living opened its doors at 617 Front Street in February 2025, co-owned by Bri Davey and Hannah Dewey, two Leavenworth residents who, as the Wenatchee World reported, had each run small artisan businesses before opening the shop together. The shop sells curated home and garden goods, but the goods aren't really the point. Dewey, a former public lands conservationist, offers garden design consultations and native-plant guidance for homeowners trying to work with the valley's ecosystem rather than against it. Davey runs workshops and a rotating in-shop book club that meets through the winter months when the garden programming pauses.
A workshop calendar and a recurring book club give customers reasons to come back. Dewey has said community was the reason they wanted the shop to be more than retail space. A year and a half later the shop is still running that same rhythm of workshops and seasonal book club meetings.
The Grocery Store That Never Needed a Rebrand
Then there's Dan's Food Market, on Highway 2, which has quietly been doing this longer than either of the above. As NCW News reported, the building started as Columbia Market in the 1950s, cycled through a laundromat and a dentist's office at various points, and became Dan's when Dan Firth took it over in 1996. Eric Worthen bought it in 2011. Jonathan and Kat Koncz took over most recently, in 2023, and by all accounts have kept the formula rather than modernizing it into something else.
The formula is worth naming because it's the same one running underneath Bushel & Bee and Alpenglö Living: staff who stick around long enough to know your name, and a store that treats locals as the anchor customer even while tourists fill in around the edges. A longtime customer named Mason Schuur, who has shopped there since the 1990s, still comes in on his lunch break for what regulars call a "Dan-wich," a custom sandwich and chips deal that runs $6.99. Store manager Cindy Puckett has talked about watching kids who used to trail their parents' carts grow up enough to get carded. That kind of continuity doesn't happen at a business built primarily to catch visitor spending. It happens at a business built to be someone's actual grocery store, for decades, with tourists as a welcome bonus rather than the business plan.
When Dan's marked its 75th anniversary in early 2025, the market was reportedly busier than it had ever been, according to NCW News, even as national grocery chains continued expanding their footprint across the valley. The bakery counter, Homefires Bakery, has become a destination in its own right. Together, those details show how the market serves regular customers and visitors.
Where the Pattern Shows Up Outside Downtown
The same logic runs past the edge of the business district, too. Eagle Creek Flower Farm's roadside stand comes alive every year from late spring into early fall, drawing a regular weekend crowd for bouquets that change with the season. If you've been meaning to stop, the window is closing. By the calendar this pattern has followed in past years, mid-September marks the tail end of the stand's season, not the middle of it.
It's a small detail, but it fits the same shape as everything above it. A roadside flower stand doesn't need billboard visibility or a tourist-season sprint. It needs a regular customer base that shows up on the same weekends year after year, which is exactly what a farm stand on a residential road, rather than Front Street, is built to attract.
What This Actually Explains
These businesses welcome tourists: Bushel & Bee wants the visitor traffic, Alpenglö Living will happily sell a candle to someone passing through, and Dan's Food Market has a parking lot full of out-of-town plates most weekends. Visitor spending is part of the local business environment, alongside the services and routines that bring local customers back.
Across these examples, the balance between visitor traffic and local customers takes a different form at each business.
That range includes a cider bar offering a locals discount to repeat visitors, a boutique running a book club through the off-season, and a grocery store with a long-running deli counter. Together, they show some of the ways businesses in Leavenworth serve residents and visitors.
Team Stoddard covers these local currents because we live inside them too, not just the market reports. If you want to learn more about daily life across Leavenworth and the surrounding valley, explore our neighborhood coverage.
