Post #376541 by Tiki Lee's on Sat, Apr 26, 2008 11:43 PM

Well friends,
It's my extreme displeasure to announce that after 6 years of being in business, I have been forced to close my little shop at the Charleston Antique Mall. New owners came in and completely botched the whole place up.
First botch: they hired one of the ancient old lady dealers to be the "manager". I don't know why she's been given that title since she's completely incompetent and does nothing but sit at the front desk all day and write up sales tickets.
Second botch: No music in the entire store. Yep, complete silence, including my room. People were complaining about it sounding so quiet it was like a morgue in there, until I reminded them that even Morgues have music playing.
Third Botch: the new owners are a husband and wife who have a buttload of money, which for some reason, makes the husband believe he has the right to be a complete asshole to everyone and boss them around like employees. He's a fat, slimy, demeaning, rude, inconsiderate rich bastard that no one likes. Too bad, 'cuz his wife is a sweetheart.

So the straw that broke this camel's back was upon returning from a rather unprofitable Tiki Farm Parking Lot Sale, I discovered that the "manager" had sold an original work of art from my room, that was marked at $350, for $22. Someone switched tags on the item, and the old bat was too stupid to realize that original art would cost much more. If one is a manager of a store, shouldn't they have a basic knowledge of items in it? I'm not the manager, but I'm smart enough to know when something doesn't seem right and needs to be questioned. I've caught plenty of mis-marked or tag-switched items over the years when I worked the front desk. So, of course, I blew every fricken gasket that I had since that artwork was consigned to me by the artist and I now have to pay him out of pocket for it. The kicker is that the manager and the husband ganged up on me a few days later to give me grief for flying off the handle at her. Never once did they apologize for the mistake, or at least say they could understand why I was (am) so furious. Instead, they played it off like it was MY fault that it happened. MY FAULT!?!? That was it. I'm done. 6 years gone inside of two days. What really sucks is that I had JUST finished setting up my new, larger, and Improved Tiki Room and placed my first ad in Tiki Magazine.

I still have the space at Main Street Antiques, but it's tiny and boring and not even close to the atmosphere I had going at The Charleston, formerly Red Rooster. I guess it's just time to quit and sell on eBay now in little increments.
Please post & let me know what you thought of my little shop if you'd ever been there. It might make me feel a little better about the loss of building something for 6 years...

[ Edited by: Tiki Lee's 2008-04-26 23:43 ]

[ Edited by: Tiki Lee's 2008-04-30 02:05 ]

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[ Edited by: Tiki Lee's 2008-05-29 22:41 ]