By Neal Pollack
When Mary first opened Abby’s Let’s Pet 18 years ago, it was a grooming and pet-supplies shop at Halsted and Cornelia. Since then Abby’s Let’s Pet has been located at Belmont and Racine, Lincoln and Irving, and its current location near the corner of Ashland and Roscoe, indicated by a big clapboard out front that reads PUPPIES.
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“It’s not really Abby’s, it’s just Let’s Pet,” explains Mary, who says she added “Abby’s” because it places the store first in the Yellow Pages. “Abby’s is short for Aberdeen. It’s a kind of dog. Scottish terrier. Let’s Pet, in case it didn’t work as a pet shop, we’d turn it into a massage parlor. Sound good? Eighteen years ago, it sounded good. Let’s Pet. I don’t know why.”
“You need your fix, your puppy fix,” Mary says. “People come off the bus every day–the same people. And they come and they hold the puppies. And they say, ‘Oh, we just came to see ’em, see if this one’s still here or that one.’”
“She got her Harley the same time I got mine,” Sue says.
All this adds up to a lot of very specialized knowledge. Sue gives some specific instructions to a woman who has just purchased a German shepherd puppy.
“They’re better than people,” Sue says.
