{"id":16,"date":"2008-01-21T02:08:20","date_gmt":"2008-01-21T07:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=16"},"modified":"2011-01-17T03:51:57","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T08:51:57","slug":"wally-crumb-forest-drive-fall-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/?p=16","title":{"rendered":"Wally &#038; Crumb, 4903 Forest Drive: Fall 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/pix\/wally_and_crumb.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/pix\/wally_and_crumb_tn.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Wally & Crumb was a small cookie bakery on Forest Drive next to the La-Z-Boy warehouse near Trenholm Plaza.  I stopped by a couple of times and got some chocolate chip cookies which were perfectly OK, but I think in the end the place had four problems:<\/p>\n<p><strong>1) Location<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In general, a cookie store is not a destination in and of itself.  I think if they had managed to locate in Trenholm Plaza, or the plaza with Piggly-Wiggly a bit up the road, they might have gotten some foot traffic from shoppers going to other destinations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>2) Signage<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The main sign for the business read \"cookies FOR SALE\".  If you were just driving by and looked over, your first impression would be that the building was for sale.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3) Lack of Marketing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Obviously I don't know what type of marketing the owners tried to do, but with their location, it would have made sense to try to get their cookies into Starbucks, The Fresh Market, Holey Dough, Hooligans & Books-A-Million at Trenholm plaza, if possible with a little placard like \"We proudly offer Columbia baked Wally & Crumb Cookies!\".  I don't know how much freedom managers at national chains like Starbucks have to offer local products, but certainly Hooligans or Holey Dough would not have been out of the question.<\/p>\n<p><strong>4) The Product<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As I said up front, the cookies were perfectly OK, but they were \"hard\" cookies, like Chips-A-Hoy.  I think that goes against people's expectations for a \"cookie store\".  When people go to a cookie store, they want something they can't get from Keebler or Chips-A-Hoy: freshly baked soft cookies.  The hard cookie market is adequately served by the national bakers and by making hard cookies Wally & Crumb removed a reason to stop at their store.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wally &#038; Crumb was a small cookie bakery on Forest Drive next to the La-Z-Boy warehouse near Trenholm Plaza. I stopped by a couple of times and got some chocolate chip cookies which were perfectly OK, but I think in the end the place had four problems: 1) Location In general, a cookie store is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[481,269,96,4],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-cookies","tag-forest-acres","tag-forest-drive","tag-stores"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/columbiaclosings.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}