Michaels..The NEW LOOK...

On February 1, 2009 me and my daughter went on an adventure to a "NEW" Michaels store. We had a local Michaels but it was small and last summer Michaels started building a new bigger store just down the street from the old one. This Michaels store is located in Eau Claire Wisconsin. I thought it would be cool to be there on opening day, so we arrived at the store around 9:30 a.m. I was also trying to make sure I was one of the first into store when it opened. Reason for being first, you ask? Well I've been stalking the new Martha Stewart Valentines Day border edge punches. The old store never got any of the Valentine punches in and all the new merchandise was being shipped to the new store, so I thought there might be a chance that the punches might be at the new store. The store opened at 10:00 a.m. Me and my daughter hopped in line at 5 minutes before opening, with about 5 people behind us. We were the first in line and the first customers into the store. I told my eight year old daughter what to look for and we went our separate ways. I found the Valentines Day merchandise but no punches to be seen there. Then I asked a store worker where the Martha Stewart punches were and asked if they had any of the Valentine punches. She lead me to an end cap with some Valentines Day things and the Martha Stewart border punches. They had two of one and three of the other one. I put one of each in my cart. I looked over the other Martha Stewart Valentines punches and put a scalloped heart punch in my cart. I also have the Heart plain and Scalloped Nestabilites but I thought the scalloped heart one was cute.

Now for the store review... It was alot bigger than the old one, maybe a little more spread out. The old store you could not get two shopping carts down an aisle, this one you could. The bead department was huge, it had a whole corner to its self. There were alot of $1.00 items, maybe three times more than the old one. There even was a whole row with $1 to $5 items. There was more rubber and clear stamps, of course I was expecting alot more of them. There was more ink pads in stock than the old store, of course I was expecting more of them too. The Cuttlebug and Sizzix items were in my opinion were less. I did see the new slice, they had two of them, zero of them when I left. I was also expecting more design paper like Basic Grey. They did have more but not really my style. I was looking for Basic Grey 6x6 pad but there were none, although they did have 3 kinds of the 12x12 packs. The art row had nearly the same amount of things. They had alot of empty spots where the Prisma Color Marker singles would be. They did have a new area in the middle of the store where the were a total of 6 bar stools for working on things. I didn't get a chance to check out the flower or yarn areas since we were already there an hour. The cashiers were all bunched up in two rows in the front, way different than before.

So my review for the store would be: I expected alot more. For somethings there were more things and for some it was less.



Thanks for stopping in, see you again soon. :)
~Kathy Hering~