My American Girl Doll store experience

This weekend was the Grand Opening of American Girl Place in Denver. The link I just put there says that the wait to get into the store was 3 hours long... ummm not QUITE! The article also estimates the crowd in the hundreds... I don't think that's very accurate either.

My friend planned to get to the store at 4am to wait. I wasn't quite that "gung-ho" so we planned to be at the store at 5am instead. We wanted to get there early because the first 100 girls in the store would get a gift bag.

I woke up at 3:50am and took my shower. Darly had set her alarm clock, so I knew she would be up soon.

Since I knew my friend was already supposed to be there, I sent an email to her iphone account and waited to see how it was going. She let me know that there were already more than 100 people in line. YIKES!

Well seeing as we were NOT going to get a gift bag, it seemed like a good idea to just wait at home where it was warm instead of going to the store and waiting in the snow storm (YES, it was 30 degrees and snowing out at that hour). So when Darly got up I let her know how we didn't get there early enough for the gift bag.

She agreed that warm was better but asked if her friend would let her know what was in the gift bag...and of course she would (she blogs too!)

So we left the house at 7:45 (which annoyed Darly) and at last check in with my friend who was freezing her butt off in the cold there were already over 1000 folks waiting with her.

When we arrived at the mall and found parking, we walked toward the store. I could already see that the line of folks extended past the section of the mall that included the store. Hopefully I'll be able to use the Mall's directory to show you just how bad the line was.

I soon located a mall security person and asked where the end of the line was. He pointed in the general direction and told me that there would be another security person over there that I could ask. We found the second security person and he directed us to the end of the line. The end was in front of the Eddie Bauer store which is where the B is on the map. The time was 8:15am. The store wasn't supposed to open until 9am.

I called my friend to see if she had any info because I knew that the store couldn't possibly hold more than a hundred or so folks. She let me know that they were told the number was 130. sigh...we were in for a wait.

so after the store actually opened we moved from the second curve in front of Eddie Bauer to the first curve.

It was so much fun to watch other families arrive and the shock on their face to see how long the line actually was. Darly & I had not gone to the front of the line so we didn't know how much snakeing there was by the front but I knew it had to be pretty bad. When we got there they were just adding the "cow ropes" to the section we were waiting in...I don't believe that the mall had any idea just how many folks were going to show up for this. Starbucks was doing VERY WELL that morning.

I think it was about 10:30 when we got to the part of the line that was close enough to the bathrooms that we risked taking turns with the family ahead of us and going to the bathroom...to warm up a bit and of course go potty.

When we finally got to the section of line that is in the actual Vistas section of the mall we figured that we were finally getting down to the end. LOL, not quite.

It was almost 1:30 pm by the time we got into the store. Yup, that's right...we waited for 5 hours to get into the store. But since we had come all that way and waited all that time Darly deserved more than just the book mark that she was able to make...so I allowed her to get some stuff for her dolls (which stayed home for this trip, they can come next time!) She picked out some cute stuff and we headed to lunch.

As we were leaving we ran into a mom and her daughter in the parking lot that had just then arrived. I guess they were hoping to avoid the crowd. LOL! They asked how long the wait was...I told them we had waited 5 hours and I expected that the line now was at least 3 hours long. Mom didn't want to wait, daughter was heart broken.

speaking of heart broken... we saw more than one fit as a child was disappointed that her parents were not willing to wait that long.

Darly has pledged her undying love for me for sticking with it. She STILL owes me a clean bedroom though.