Coldstone Creamery opened a new store in Germantown last year. I’ve never been in it and at this point, I don’t ever plan to go there.
Laura and I have a running joke about how we’ve been cursed. We’re not really sure who put the curse on us, much less why, but it seems as though every time we go out for ice cream, we find that the store closing time was five minutes before we got there, or else the place has gone out of business.
It’s not universal. We’ve had very few problems with national chains such as Dairy Queen, and on more than one occasion, we actually arrived five to ten minutes before Baskin Robbins closed.
On the other hand, there’s a small hamburger and ice cream shop up in Frederick that we took a liking to last summer. It’s definitely not a franchise store and at the time we started going there, it had been owned and operated by the same family for several decades. Shortly after we decided that it was one of “our places” to go for food, we learned that the place had been sold. We’ve been afraid to go back since.
Early last fall, Laura and I went up to the Germantown Town Center and on the way to dinner, walked past the new Coldstone Creamery. The store had been in the works for a while, but this was the first time I’d seen it open; and not merely open, there was a line reaching out to the sidewalk and down to the next storefront. We made a note to stop there on our way back to the car.
After dinner, we decided to take a walk around the new Town Center and around 7:00, we stopped at Coldstone. Despite the fact that the store was packed with customers and one of the workers was sitting out front on a break, the door was locked! We each tried the door again to no avail at which point the fellow taking his break looked up and told us, “We’re not open.”
The store was full of customers, the time was 7:00 and (according to the sign anyhow), they were supposed to be open for another two hours. But they weren’t open?! What an interesting business model that must be! I’ll laugh about being cursed when I arrive after closing time, but to refuse service during business hours when they’re open to other customers, that’s just plain rude.
Several people have told me that Coldstone’s product is good. I wouldn’t know; they wouldn’t serve me and thus lost me as a potential customer. I doubt I’m missing much though, several other people have told me that they’ve also experienced service problems with that chain.
The staff at Ben & Jerry’s always treats me nicely though.