I have never used Yelp before, but my visit to this store has been spinning in my mind and I felt…read morelike I had to leave a review.
I usually love little collectible and game stores like this, so when I noticed this store in Plano I was eager to check it out. I first visited a few months ago, where my experience was stiff and uncomfortable; As other reviews have stated, the store was filthy. The young man who was watching the store, when I walked in, was sitting around piles of fast food wrappers, garbage, and even dirty laundry. (Yes, dirty laundry. There was a pair of boxers on the floor next to a backpack.)
He was not the store owner, and when I left, it was with a sense of pity - I thought, "I feel bad for the store owner, maybe he doesn't know his employee trashed the place while he was gone".
The disappointing part about Geektopia is there is some genuinely neat stuff there, but it is hardly much of a real store. It felt like walking into a hoarded basement that happened to have shelving.
Several months after my first visit, I found myself in Plano again and wanted to see if Geektopia was the same; I thought in my head, out of curiosity, if it really had been just an employee who had trashed the store. I would be further disappointed on my second visit, because it was even worse this time around.
When I first walked in, it hit me right away that the store smelled very bad, like stale body odor. There were pieces of cardboard, plastic, straw wrappers, and crumbs /everywhere/ on the carpet. Next to the entrance was some kind of work table, but it was covered in trash and drinks and boxes and hardly anything could be seen of the actual table. What was worse was slightly further past this, there was a hardly visible glimpse of a couch that was likewise stacked with garbage, bins of items, and miscellaneous junk. It did not look like it had been touched or processed in the months between my visits.
The owner, I presumed because he was an older gentleman, was in the lazy boy recliner that I had seen the previous employee in; Just like before, the chair was badly stained and surrounded by garbage, fast food trash, cables, and junk. To my relief there was at least no dirty laundry that I could see, but there were used crumpled tissues on the ground. I have a photo of this but I am unsure if I would be allowed to share here.
It is sad to see what could have been a fun small business to support on my trips to Plano be so filthy and unwelcoming. I left the store feeling outright gross, and even moreso than anything, just confused. Running a business is difficult, but I don't understand making it harder for oneself by keeping the business so filthy. Though there were some hidden gem items and interesting finds there, Geektopia ultimately became a place I never wanted to step foot in again, no matter what the merchandise was. It was truly, honestly, disappointingly, that gross.
