OOPS. I wasn't paying attention and I seem to have accidentally become a Disney Store. A few years ago when my wife and I unhandily found that we were both unemployed at the same time I put both our resumes up on one of my web sites. We have since both found jobs and I forgot that the page was out there. There was little enough interest in the page back when we were both looking for work and recently the only ones to visit it are internet spiders -- programs that follow random links on the web looking for this and that. A spider looking for information to go on this list of local disney stores in our area came across my wife's resume, noticed that it contained 1) the words "Disney Store", 2) an address and 3) a telephone number, and put two and two together. Hey! Presto! It made us a Disney Store.
We got a call this morning from a very nice young lady who had done an online search which identified us as the Disney Store in Cary. (Actually, the Cary store closed several years ago and the nearest Disney Store is the one in Raleigh, 20 miles away.) She told me that she had gotten our phone number from the Disney Store's official store-locator site. I was curious about this and tried to do the query myself but I found that all the official Disney web sites do not mention the in-mall Disney Stores at all. A Disney Store in a mall? No such thing! The very idea!! (Disney corporate is quietly phasing out the in-mall stores -- at least most of them -- a fact which they will neither confirm nor deny publicly.)
If you let your search-engine nudge you off the "official" Disney sites and into the Disney-hanger-on'er sites, such as the one I linked to above, you can find mention of the local stores although the information may be a bit dodgy.
When the spiders made me a Disney Store they failed to provide me with any merchandise. In particular, I cannot sell you the friendly, lovable, blood-sucking bear illustrated above. I'm not even sure I could find the page again where I snagged the image. I seem to recall that the prices were in Yen so it may only be available in Japan and it may also not be this years merchandise. [Update: try "Vampire plush pooh" in eBay. ]
2 comments:
BigLee"s wife Irene here.
The reason that information about the Disney Store can not be found in sites posted/hosted by "The Walt Disney Company" is that the stores have been sold to "A Children's Place" corporation. The Disney Stores are no longer a part of the "Disney" family any more than Walmart, which sells Disney themed merchandize, is.
I went to look at The Children's Place web site to see if their store locator would show Disney Stores. I didn't spend a lot of time at it and the answer seems to be no. Like I said, I didn't spend much time looking but it didn't jump out at me.
Along the way I did find this story about rumours of the sale on a very interesting Disney-themed blog where I also found links to a story about the man who sank DisneyLand's river boat (the Mark Twain) on opening day and a slide show of Fats Domino returning to inspect the damage to his New Orleans home after the flooding (be sure to check out his couch from the "before" photos).
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