Or more correctly… I hate Spotlight.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Spotlight is a chain of fabric stores across Australia…. or I should say they used to be fabric stores. Once upon a time they stocked predominantly fabric and habadashery but now they sells things like crockery, bed linen, homewares and crafty stuff (like scrapbooking nonsense, paints, felt, feathers, beads buttons etc). Our local Spotlight used to be a regular stop and was always guaranteed to have what you needed’ in sewing staples. You could turn up pretty sure they’d have plenty of standard lines like 100% linens, cottons, damasks, threads and bias binding etc,
But they’ve rearranged all their stores (up here – don”t know what’s going on elsewhere) and have literally halved their space allocation to dress making and furnishing fabrics and given that extra space up to scrapbooking shit. For anyone who doesn’t know, scrapbooking is a craft craze for people without any original thought or creativity where they make photo albums/journals and fill them full of overpriced little stick ons and supposedly pithy sayings and observations. We hate scrapbooking too in case you can’t tell. But I digress…
I”m doing a little sewing (revamping an old tunic to be a bit more acceptable) and went looking for black cotton drill to use as lining fabric. So I headed to Spotlight because they’ll have five types of black cotton drill to choose from right? Wrong. No black cotton drill. No black cotton braodcloth, no homespun, no indian cotton, no calvalry drill, Nothing in furnishing fabrics or dress fabrics. The closest they could direct me to was some flimsy black poplin. No shit. They even called the huge Springwood store for me and they didn’t have any black cotton drill either.
So what, you might say. Well it’s true like every other business they have every right to maximize their profit by expanding on their best selling departments and scaling back their lesser earners. But my objection stems from the fact that they spent several years edging every other fabric store out of the market with lower prices to the point where there’s hardly anywhere else to shop for material and now that they’ve succeeded in being just about the only fabric store in the city they’re stocking less and less fabric!!!
Bastards. I’d totally boycott their stores except there’s no where else to go!
SUCKS!!!
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