Almost Famous: Mount Vernon's sweetest spot now accepting K-Card

The K-Card is truly a powerful tool. From allowing students to access their dorms, buy their daily cup of coffee, get a snack or just pay for their laundry, the goods and services one can acquire through a K-Card are numerous.

Over the past few months Kenyon has been working hard to partner with local businesses both on and off campus in order to broaden the shopping and dining options available for students whose preferred method of payment is their K-Card. Almost Famous Sweets and Sodas in Mount Vernon is one of the newest (and tastiest) K-Card-accepting businesses.

Almost Famous Sweets and Sodas’ owners Tia and Nick Vicars first came to Mount Vernon in 2015 on a visit from their home in Columbus. They fell in love with the family friendly community they found and three years later decided to open a store that offers a dizzying array of candies and over 150 soda flavors.

Tia notes that Kenyon students are frequent visitors to the store and that international students are often regulars as Almost Famous offers a sizable range of international candies that are often difficult to find in Central Ohio.

Vicars strongly recommends the store’s freeze-dried candies and Canton, Ohio-produced cracked corn, the buyers of which she ensures will have a “whole other level of flavor experience.”

For those sweets aficionados who always need to be in the know, Almost Famous actively posts on several social media sites including Facebook and TikTok. And while the store does not have a website, Vicars says this is intentional as getting people to physically visit allows her to make people feel like, “kids in a candy shop.”

Almost Famous is just one of many new K-Card-accepting businesses, the list of which now expanded to include a plethora of restaurants and even an Axe throwing venue. What’s more, even if students can’t make it to a brick and mortar store's location, businesses like Almost Famous offer direct delivery, which can be paid for…with a K-Card.