We have had several interactions with this place since we scheduled my son's fourth birthday party. Almost all of them have been bad.
The first time I tried to order an "online exclusive" from the website, and I was told I would not have to pay shipping if I ordered from the store. When the bear went on sale, my husband hurried in to make good on it, only to have someone from the store tell him they would not honor the sale price. Even without shipping, we were charged more than if we had just ordered from the website.
Weeks ago, we made a reservation for our son's fourth birthday party. We paid for it with a credit card, the charge went through, and then we sent invitations. A few days before the party we called the store again to give them a headcount and learned that they didn't have our reservation anymore. Eventually we were told we could make a new one on the same day and time. Weird, but okay. We were told some machine had been broken the first time we made the reservation.
On the day of the party, when we walked in and introduced ourselves, people looked around like they were on a panic. A woman asked me for our information again and finally found something scribbled on a piece of paper. "Sorry," she said. "Machine's broken." So they basically just never fixed it for weeks.
Prior to making our reservation for the first time, I spent at least half an hour on the phone with someone who seemed helpful. She promised (and an online description confirmed) that a staff member would lead the children in building bears, games, and songs. She assured me they were experienced at handling large crowds of mixed ages as young as 2. She said the reservation was for an hour and that they would move some of the displays around to section off the party from the rest of the crowded store.
Instead...we couldn't start on time because the party leader, Madi, was half an hour late. Half an hour! When she arrived, she barely spoke with us and barely interacted with the kids except to direct them to the parts and bears. When all the children were assembled in front of the machine to stuff the bears, she asked my son, who is shy, if he wanted to sing a song or play a game. He said no. Then she didn't engage him or any of the other children for games or songs after that; instead she solemnly filled bears with stuffing while the children began milling around. "I want to go home," my son said at that point. He had been the first to fill his stuffed animal and had nothing to do. He looks utterly morose in most pictures. Eventually I noticed that a second worker had started to fill bears, to get this debacle over faster. How can you have a young kid's party without games, songs, drinks, or food (the last two are banned because they don't want spills)? It felt transactional; we were really just taking his friends shopping and modeling consumption for the other kids at the mall. There was no privacy. No one bothered to rearrange things for a feeling of separation from the rest of the mall. We couldn't get anyone to help us with anything until the party leader showed up half an hour late.
We had a larger number of people show up than RSVPed. Some kids who were invited and RSVPed brought uninvited, unanticipated siblings who also made bears. That's not BAB's fault, but because of how the party leader handled things (late and then had to barrel into things, not that interactive with kids or us) what started out as a socially awkward situation got out of our control. There was no central theme to the party besides purchasing a stuffed animal, so people just left after theirs were done. One woman who brought two siblings left while another parent of two siblings offered to pay for his uninvited kid. There was no accounting of who was doing what until the very end with the party leader ringing us up.
When my husband and I were feeling frantic (we had no plans to entertain the 16 or so young kids in the mall for half an hour before they could touch anything), we overheard the demoralized staff members talking about the party leader, Madi: "Of course she's late." "How long is she going to keep getting away with this?" To us they just said: "We're really sorry, we can't do anything, she's not here yet." So basically this is a recurring problem that the store does not take seriously and that staff members for whatever reason are disempowered to fix.
"Would you recommend BAB for birthday parties?" Two parents have asked since then. No! Not this location. Certainly not. read more