Dairy Queen, Bon-Ton & Staples Too

You may have heard of the teen who worked at Dairy Queen that took a $20 bill out of his own pocket after a lady picked it up after a blind gentleman dropped it. According to the report, he ordered the lady to leave the store when she refused to give the money back to the blind gentleman. After that, he took out his wallet and gave the blind man $20 from his own pocket. He got many phone calls thanking him for what he did including mogul Warren Buffet himself.

Now if this incident happened at Staples, the employee would more than likely get fired before the end of his shift for taking money out of his own pocket. The reason is that Staples requires that employees carry no money with them out on the sales floor. Since the company would have zero-tolerance toward this type of action, he would have no recourse despite being the “right thing to do”.

Secondly, by treating the woman rudely, it would be possible that if that happened here in Maine that the woman could sue for discrimination and collect a huge payday like the woman who had a case against Piercing Pagoda and made a $100,000 collection.

Certainly both Staples and Maine itself are messed up in their priorities. Both need to change their ways and dig deeper into details before jumping to conclusions.

On another front, a new store opened at the Maine Mall back on Thursday, September 12. Bon-Ton, however, was open for business 2 days earlier for those like me who was interested in browsing the store.

The store is located in the former Filene’s location that pretty much has been vacant since that company’s closing 7 years ago. For a short period of time, a recreational area was located in this space, but has since moved to another part of the mall. Pretty much the store looks pretty much the same as when Filene’s occupied the space. As far as the outside goes that is a different story. Gone are the beautiful windows that overlooked the parking lot from 2 sides and the gray color of the building itself. The store is painted the same color as the other side of the mall which houses H&M, Forever 21, and Sports Authority. Not that this is a bad thing, just not unique anymore.

When I entered the store, there were several employees around the front of the store. However, not a single one of them greeted me as I walked in. I didn’t really feel bad as most every place I go I am never greeted by anyone at all either. The layout of the store is very similar to Macys, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s and all those other similar stores. And this is where the problem exists: too many stores all selling basically the same things and being just like each other. The bad thing about this store is that it reminded too much of the former Filene’s store that occupied the space.

When I went to the second floor, I took the elevator up. Here is where I noticed the big flaw in the whole remodel process. The metal numbers by the push buttons inside the elevator were significantly worn out. Whether this was an oversight, it was obvious that the equipment was very old. Other than that the store looked pretty “new” otherwise.

Overall, it took me about ten minutes to walk both floors as I really didn’t care anything about what they were selling. Apparently nobody else was neither as I never saw a single transaction rung up during my stay in the store nor did I see anybody walking around with a bag from the store either.

What really bothered me the most though was the television ads that the company ran prior to its opening? They claimed that their store was located in PORTLAND Maine when in reality it is located in SOUTH PORTLAND Maine. Even the website points to a link of Portland instead of South Portland. If you don’t know what city you are in, you will confuse the customer and anger the local residents of that town like myself. For this reason alone, I am deducting 4 points off my grade for not knowing their location.

My Score: 4

Summary: No greeting by any employee in a store that is so much like many others that there is nothing here to differentiate from the competition. I have no interest of returning to this store ever again. Hopefully, this company dies like so many lookalikes.