Yelp Rule no.# 8675309: No two franchises are alike! Period.
For example the Five Below in Del Norte Plaza by Northstar Mall might yield a different set of experiences than say the one, which I recently encountered in the Southside. In all fairness to this location my review happened to coincide with the Christmas shopping season. But is that any excuse for a business to succumb to incivility and floors littered with items such as the Poop Emoji game? Friend, I feel that stores have slowly become the measures of our frustations. Let me begin by starting at the beginning.
If you've never been to a FB everything is five dollars or less, a place created with last minute shoppers in mind. They offer: sloth printed blankets, fuzzy journals, Star Wars toys (of irrelevant characters), Polo cologne knockoffs, gaudy makeup, etc. It's mainly stuff that people purchase in bulk to use as fillers to accompany gifts. Once inside they have these small blue carrying baskets that you pull as if you were lugging a suitcase through an airport terminal. It's really quite confusing further exacerbated the minute you walk through the door.
Firstly you find yourself maneuvering your basket through very limited space. It's all one big clusterfudge. Inventory is scattered all over the floor as if barbarians came to pillage and plunder. Children are running, screaming unsupervised by parents. Whilst adults are on their phones surveying items only to throw them back onto the floor. It reminded me of that scene in "Raising Arizona" where the kids are chasing each other, guided by chaos. I saw a store associate throw up their hands in resignation as if to say, "They don't pay me enough to do this!"
Mind you I know the shopper during Christmas is wired differently as opposed to other times of the year. They become very tunnel visioned. As a result they invade your personal bubble. It creates a snowball effect. Aisles give way to rudeness. The manner in which we shop at a store often represents the way in which we carry ourselves in life. I don't expect people to be holding hands and singing Kumbaya next to the Mr. Rogers t-shirts. I do see why online shopping via Amazon is becoming more appealing to people versus the stress in stores.
At this point I ask myself do different locations of the same brand deliver varying degrees of an experience? For example say FB's location in Northwoods. Would there be a better selection? Would the place be in order? Would patrons be more humane? Or do the holidays bring out the worse in human behavior? I'm not sure. I can only judge a place on its individual merits at the time of purchases.
There probably is no reason for me to go on about my discontent. No sooner do you enter a place do you exit it. And these are good things to know. Sometimes one franchise's location is welcoming the next, you thought you stepped midway into the apocalypse. A brick and mortar store is really just some arbitrary mechanism that doesn't care one way or the other. It is its managers, staff and ultimately us that make a place great or suck.
ps. If your Secret Santa got you that embarrassingly bad set of makeup I'm not totally saying they got it here! Okay, I am! read more
