DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, at-will, contract, or in a consultative capacity, an employee of Cosmic corner, nor do I have any type of ownership interest in the business. I am only a customer who has interacted with every employee many, many times.
Cosmic Corner has been and continues to be my go-to vape/head shop. I find the couple of cranky, cantankerous reviews from others arse-backwards. Every staffer I have encountered at CC has been helpful beyond any reasonable expectation for a retail store. And yes, if you want the "friendly hippie head shop" kind of staff that is willing to go through piece after piece until you find that perfect new gem of custom glass for your collection, or help you figure out what the heck the name of a product you once owned half a decade ago was based entirely off of your own vague recollections, you may have to wait your turn.
In this kind of biz, you can have speedy and cold or you can have warm, helpful and thorough--but you can't have both; to attempt to deliver both would mean insolvency and, ultimately, closure. And, FWIW, both of those examples I gave (about finding the perfect piece of glass and about recalling a product based entirely on vague memories) are REAL LIFE examples from my own personal experiences @ CC.
Cosmic Corner is a Racine institution, and invaluable to its very loyal core customer base. I'm a Chicago transplant who has spent time all over the country, and CC is the only true "head shop" in the area (based on my personal life experiences). I think the crappier reviews represent a fundamental confusion based on a recent market disruption in the industry: e-cigs/juice. CC has a wonderful assortment of e-juices (buy local--go with the River City brand) as well as every tier of e-cig, from the simplest disposable to the craziest sub-ohm mods. HOWEVER, at the end of the day, CC IS A HEAD SHOP. And the defining features of great head shops are always their employees; like almost every other head shop I have ever been in, if you treat them with respect and decency, you will always get the same in return. If you are looking for an establishment where you can act like a horse's petute and still have the employees bowing and scraping, you should probably avoid head shops altogether and just order your stuff online. That's head shops, and for those of us that frequent them, we would NEVER want that to change.
Head shops have recently had their business model disrupted by the emergence of e-cigs, and there is a certain amount of adaptation taking place, not just at CC--everywhere. But I can tell you that these employees and this establishment are wonderful, funny, kind, warm, caring people. It's the kind of place you go into just to go into. It seems like the negative reviews are coming from people that went in expecting an e-cig store. CC is a head shop that has a very large selection of e-cig products. Giant difference. read more
