Commercials

For today's Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories, we discussed shopping. Something that goes hand in hand with shopping is advertising.

We've all watched commercials on television. We've been getting some unusual ones on our local television lately. When we first started getting Macy's commercials airing quite regularly, I grew very hopeful that they had somehow managed to put a store in our area without my hearing about it. However, when I went to their web site to search for locations near here, I came up blank. I began to try other large cities in the area. As nearly as I can tell, the two closest Macy's locations are in Greenville, South Carolina and Lexington, Kentucky -- both a little over 3 hours away. Next would be Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina -- the former being about 3.5 hours away (although the store is probably a full 4 hours away) and the latter two being about 4 hours away.

I just find it unusual that Macy's (which I would dearly love to come into our area because Belk has terrible buyers and has very little competition) would advertise as heavily as they have when it's three hours to the nearest store. [Dillard's is the only other national competition for them.] I might be able to see doing such a thing out west where towns are further apart and people regularly drive long distances to shop; however, they don't have stores in Knoxville, the tri-cities area (Johnson City, Kingsport, Bristol), or Asheville. It just seems a little odd that they are making me want to drive such a long distance to discover the "magic of Macy's." I wish they'd just put a store in either the new Dumplin Creek development that is under construction at exit 407 in Kodak (which is the main exit for Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg) or at Turkey Creek (which is further but would still be better than driving to Lexington or Greenville).