Yarr! Thar Be Hidden Treasure in that Strip Mall!
I ran a number of shopping errands today: garden shears for the overgrown holly bushes, window shopping for Star Wars gaming material, birthday shopping for Eileene, and a replacement bulb for our AeroGarden. I had some trouble with the last, because I couldn’t find the Bed Bath & Beyond store.
It wasn’t my fault, either. I showed the presence of mind to call ahead to make sure they had the part, which required finding a particular store to call, so finding an address was part of the deal. Right up on Rte. 46, no more than five miles from our house, a route I’ve traveled many, many times. I even double-checked on Yahoo! maps: sure enough, right up in the stretch of strip malls shortly before the mall at the convergence of 23, 46, and 80.
Well, not exactly. Turns out there’s an extra strip mall tucked away in there, which I’ve hardly ever seen—the reason being that it’s set on end: only the Coconuts music shop is in fact visible from Route 46, and the rest of the strip mall is on an entirely different road altogether, an unremarkable little local road. The Bed Bath & Beyond faces this little road; the store is a couple hundred yards from Route 46. Its address is a courtesy only.
What has me wondering is why the store would want the courtesy. Perhaps they gain a certain amount of extra custom from people who, like me, figure “Hey, Route 46—I can get there,” but they must surely lose it to people who, also like me, wrongly conclude they know just where it is. I very nearly gave up and went home after my second loop through the tangle of New Jersey U-turns in the area and a drive several miles past my target; if I hadn’t spotted a stray sign (in the wrong color, red) hidden behind an overpass after deciding to head home, they would have lost my business entirely—and I had done enough homework that I knew it was in there somewhere. Wouldn’t an accurate, if less immediately recognizable, address be preferable? In this era of the Google search, complete with a link to the Google map in case you should want it, no one would remain baffled by the location for long if they got a proper address, while I lost half an hour or more and stopped at Target and Linens & Things first out of desperation simply because I’d been led to believe the store front was in the wrong place. It was only the good fortune of Bed Bath & Beyond that those two shops didn’t carry the product I wanted, plus a last-second glimpse, that got them my business.