Tend to let the outdoor merchandise get a little untidy during the good weather months? Do you move some of the bigger and more impressive objects out onto the sidewalk in front of the shop during the summer, maybe encroach on the parking spaces a bit?

If you do, and those objects impede the progress of someone into a parking spot or down that sidewalk, beware! You may be guilty of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and if the person in charge of enforcing those statutes decides that's the case, you can be closed down.

At least that's the view of code enforcement officer Mike Sullivan of Bryant, Arkansas. He shut down Junktiques, an antiques and collectibles shop off Interstate 30 in early December 2004 for violating the act.

Sullivan heard complaints about the number of items Junktiques left around outside the store and ordered the owner, James Buchanan, to shut the doors. According to a report in the Benton Courier of December 3, 2004, it wasn't the first time Sullivan had ordered Junktiques closed.

"It has always been the same thing over there," Sullivan said. "There have been accessibility issues because of the clutter in and around the store," according to the Benton Courier story. (Sullivan did not return our phone calls, and we were unable to reach Buchanan.)

There is no phone listing for Junktiques in Bryant, but a search of directories did turn up five other antiques shops there, all situated along the same stretch of I-30. In an on-line business directory, four of the five are described as having between one and four employees, doing under $500,000 in business annually, and three have been in business for over ten years.

Three shops are named malls or markets (probably meaning they are group shops). One of them, Blue Suede Shoes Antique Mall, listed as having over 250 employees (300 exhibitors, it turned out), has been in business over three years and reported a gross of between $20 million and $50 million annually (totally incorrect, the owner said between laughs).

We were able to reach four out of the five.

The woman answering the phone at Antiques & Unique Market didn't want to give her name but did say that since they'd been in business with a new owner for under a year, they were "totally handicapped accessible, with wide aisles and no clutter to bother anyone on crutches or in wheelchairs."

The owner of Blackwell Antiques (a Mr. Blackwell, evidently, people were very reluctant to identify themselves) said his is a single-owner shop mainly importing antiques from Europe and selling them wholesale to smaller retail shops that don't hold import licenses. "We get some retail in," he said, "but we've never had a problem of accessibility...Junktiques is my neighbor, and I'm not going to say anything bad about him."

Jim Willbern is the owner of the megashop Blue Suede Shoes Antique Mall ("With three hundred exhibitors, we're the largest antiques shop in Arkansas"). He assured us that he had made the store entirely accessible to customers of all types. "It's just good business," he said. "The average antiques customer is over fifty and possibly prone to some ailments, so you'd be a fool to do anything to limit access for them.

"We adhered very strictly to all the ADA requirements as to signage, floor space, restrooms, parking, and more, when we built this place," Willbern said.

We only encountered one shop owner, a Mr. Warnock of Warnock's Antiques (who corrected the report that he had one to four employees with the terse comment, "Nope, just me"), who had a negative comment about the accessibility issue. "People complain too much today," he said.

"If they look in and don't like what they see, they can stay away. People want the right to get into everywhere today. It's wrong." He admitted he had had trouble with code inspectors in Bryant. "It's the fire inspectors, they come around and check the dates of your extinguishers and see if the doors are blocked and all. There's too much inspection today; the government gets too involved in our lives. It's wrong, that's all, but I've never been closed down for anything."

So why are we covering what appears to be a rather minor news event?

Maybe you haven't visited a lot of antiques shops or walked the floors at shows lately. Antiques shops and dealers' booths sometimes get very messy, but this is the first time we've heard of one of them being cited for an ADA violation. Title III-1.2000 of the Americans with Disabilities Act covers public accommodations and reads:

"A place of public accommodation is a facility whose operations affect commerce; and fall within at least one of the following 12 categories: 1) Places of lodging...; 2) Establishments serving food or drink...; 3) Places of exhibition or entertainment...; 4) Places of public gathering...; 5) Sales or rental establishments (e.g., bakeries, grocery stores, hardware stores, shopping centers)"; and seven others not named here for relevance and space considerations. Note the inclusion of "sales or rental establishments"—antiques shops fall into that category and are therefore covered.