Last month I wrote about “A sham of a shop in Wolfchase Mall” by the name of Dough Boy Mini’s. The short of the story is this: A friend noticed the shop wasn’t open, and hasn’t ever been open even though it’s been listed as coming soon for over a year, yet the Facebook page and website treat the store as up and running! Upon inquiring on the Facebook page for the store about why the place wasn’t open, she got blocked and her comment deleted. This not only resulted in me writing my article, but also many people slamming the site with poor reviews mocking how it was listed as being “open” yet clearly wasn’t.
UPDATE: The location mentioned is now a “convenience store” inside a mall. Not the best thing, but it’s certainly not the doughnut place it was supposed to be.
I took an opportunity the other day to go and look over the storefront, and I noticed something: The store branding was gone. No more “coming soon” sign or anything other than an advertisement for jewelry from another store. The black cloth was tight over the security bars. The place was dead.
No more branding, no more coming soon sign, no nothing!
I was surprised. Had we done something? Had we put enough pressure on the owner to abort whatever shady business he was doing, if he was doing anything of the sort, which is what we suspect with the effort he took to censor people asking about the store, and caused him to abandon the project?
Quite possibly. See, something I did after writing my article was submit it to a local news station. While nothing ever actually came of this (as far as I have seen) there might be a chance that the news began inquiring on the subject, and when the mall was alerted, they looked into it themselves and pulled the plug. Maybe the owner was contacted and he ran off himself. Or maybe nothing happened with the news, and instead, the collective attack on the Facebook page for the store was enough to break the illusion and end his effort. Who knows.
All that is there is a sign for the Jewelry fix-it place, which is terrible, by the way.
Now, I constantly mention that things didn’t seem right with this store, and that it seemed like he had something to hide. After all, a simple inquiry like that could have been met with a better reaction than a deletion of the comment and an outright ban – he was on a mission to censor information, forgetting that while he can block commenters, he can’t delete reviews left on the page. the 48 hour onslaught the page got certainly would catch the attention of anyone wanting to check up on the store, such as investors, perhaps? You see where I’m going with this, right?
Again, we don’t have any hard evidence; only speculation, but another friend, doing research on the store owner, discovered he has a history of one-off businesses, among several other things that just “don’t look right” according to him, as a business owner himself.
The original 3 images that my friend took. Note the branding and such, which is now gone.
Once again I must add the disclaimer that I don’t know for sure on any of this, but it is only strong speculation as a possible explanation to why this all went down as it did. Upon discovering the storefront was no longer advertising the sham shop, the friends involved in the raid, as one would call it, seemed quite happy that something had happened, after over a year of the store saying “coming soon” and being listed as open online when it clearly wasn’t.
If I actually liked Wolfchase Mall, I would inquire with management asking “what happened” to the store, acting like I really wanted to see it come, only to be upset that it didn’t make it; maybe they would tell me more, within reason, about what happened, and maybe I could piece together things from that information.
I’m still considering contacting the owner via some method and asking what happened – it might be fun, or, it might be a disaster. I don’t know. Gotta pick your battles, and considering it seems we “won” this one (for whatever it was, or what it was worth) maybe I should stand down and relax.
As it stands, the Facebook page and the Website itself are still up. Eventually they will go down, I’m sure, but for now they stand as a testament that you can’t try to lie to people in Memphis. Someone will call you out, and while this city can be incredibly divided at times, other times, even for something this trivial, we will stand together, if only for a laugh.
Looks like you took your move Raishawn, and moved right the hell out of Memphis. Smart move.
Once again you might ask why we would even care. The reason? Aside from the fact that my friends comment was deleted in such a way that made things seem fishy, this spot, as I mentioned before, was where the Arcade used to be in the Mall a decade ago – a place that I have fond memories of. Naturally, for some strange reason, as humans do, I care about what goes on in that spot, so in an odd way, this random junk was personal.