Grocery Market - Shop, Play, and Let Creativity Bloom!, Cream & Brown

Beautiful and nostalgic. My daughter loved the pizzeria for her collection.

Adorable! Calico Critters are quality toys you will want to save for your kids kids to play with one day!

Grand daughter loved it. she has a place for her critters.

My daughter loves it

So cute with list of little pieces to play with. Perfect quality, typical of your calico critters toys!

This is a delightful little grocery market, and a lovely gift, provided you apply stickers yourself ahead of time, especially if it's a gift for a child, but more of that later. I'll be dividing this review into the negatives first and ending with some of the positives. Long time Calico Critters fans remember the amazing Supermarket released a few years ago which won a toy award. Honestly, if you can find that, it is a far better value because of the lavish amount of tiny groceries and especially the darling, tiny, cardboard boxed goods accessories that are so realistic looking. So if you only have room for one grocery store in your Calico Critters collection, rather go for the older release Supermarket, even though it costs a little more. I should mention right away that there are no figures included so even though the included story booklet has the enterprising Marshmallow mouse mother running the store, you have the flexibility of choosing and purchasing separately whatever family you prefer to run the shop. NEGATIVES: This new release has waaaay less accessories. Actually, it's rather disappointing in the accessory department. I think it's because some parents have been docking review stars because they don't like tiny cardboard and paper boxes which they consider "flimsy" or the toy having "lots of tiny pieces" which "get lost" or is a "hazard." This is disappointing for kids and parents who love miniatures as well as for all the adult miniaturists who love to collect this toy line. It takes hours and hours for miniaturists to format, print and cut out their own tiny, cardboard cereal, cookie and pasta boxes. We love Calico Critters sheets of printed and pre-cut paper goods accessories. What a luxurious treat! Sad to see them eliminated here. [Now I'm the one docking a star because they're missing and I'm not a fan of the stickered plastic box replacements. Poor Epoch, they can't win for trying!] Instead the manufacturer Epoch seems to have tried to cater to the complainers instead by just giving this set a few plastic boxes with a sheet of complex stickers to try and wrap around them to turn them into a box of cereal etc. The stickers are incredibly difficult to get on correctly. I consider my stickering-fu to be pretty honed due to the extensive Calico Critters collection we have, but my grocery accessories ended up looking a bit wretched and one torn. This was due to me having to repeatedly peel the stickers back up and reposition them over and over again until eventually just settling for "too bad, it is what it is now" because the stickers were starting to disintegrate! I suppose a plastic box will be considered less flimsy as a toy than the more true to life printed cardboard/paper boxes. However those stickers are going to peel up and get tatty quickly too, so its really just changing one set of problems for another for those bothered by non-durability during active frequent play. I used to put a Styrofoam block into the boxes if giving it to a child. Calico Critters fans look forward to unboxing as you get first a craft experience in the minor assembling and stickering frenzy and then a toy and collectible miniature to enjoy. However, I have to say that the stickering required on this building and its accessories was extensive. The stickers seemed never ending... and hard! On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being easy-peasy, I would put this at a 9 or 10 for difficulty and this said as an adult. Especially tricksy are the door stickers and roof stickers on the inside of the building, the curved awnings, some of the signs and the aforementioned groceries. It took me well over an hour to finish applying all the stickers and that was working non-stop with tweezers and a magnifying glass visor on my face. In the end, the result was still disappointing and I'm an adult who does a lot of complex crafting. So my advise is, IF GIVING THIS TO A CHILD, DO THE STICKERING AHEAD OF TIME FOR THEM. If you let them do it themselves, IT WILL END IN TEARS. It will probably end in tears for you too, but the resulting product will be less gnarly. You will need a large glass of wine and chocolate to reward yourself (and probably drown your sorrows) afterwards for the frustration you will be putting yourself through. The stickers that go around the base of the checkout counter aren't quite long enough which means there is a gap of ugly brown on each of the outer corners on the one side. I solved this by cutting off little pieces from the leftover borders on the sticker sheet and "L-ing" them around the corners first before then overlapping the stickers over the filler strips. I had to find this out the hard way, then try to carefully peel up the original stickers to try sneak the jimmy-rig in underneath them. So I mention it here to save you the same silliness. Now for the slightly bizarre/comical: The breakfast cereal is called Breakfast Gluten, and then in smaller print it says it is gluten free. Critters are a quirky lot, no? I hope your critters reaallly love canned corn. Bizarrely, even though there are only 4 cans in the whole store, the two small cans are identical creamed corn and the 2 large ones are identical canned corn. Would have been nice to have 4 different products for some shopping variety. I guess the store owner has an extreme obsession with canned corn and the various ways to can it, sort of like Bubba and all his many ways to eat shrimp. But for a small kid this won't bother them much. Due to the way the windows and doors curve and display themselves, it seems they are especially crying out for some faux glass panes, and I find myself wishing for them. However this would have greatly added to the manufacturing complexity and therefore pushed up the price point too much. The checkout counter has a modern credit card chip scanner and a credit card. It feels out of place and too high tech for the Calico Critters world which has traditionally been more vintage-retro. Kids might like pretend playing with it though, provided they don't lose the credit card pretty much immediately. A sticker tip: the two faces on the credit card seem to be slightly different sizes as are the two stickers (tweezers needed!). This is not explained in the directions so I found this out the hard way and there is no way to fix it now. The back sticker for the credit card is slightly smaller and seems to fit better on the side of the card with the circle imprint. POSITIVES: This new design is very appealing architecturally which makes it worth the $28.99 Amazon was charging at the time I purchased it. The architectural detail is visually stunning and interesting. It looks lovely and more downtown gourmet and fancy, especially when set up with the Calico Critters Town Series buildings. The color scheme is really beautiful. The building is designed to lightly snap on or off its base. This allows you to turn it all the way around and have most of the flooring on the front if you are going to display it with its back to a wall. It's larger than I expected. The box pictures show it fitting on top of the smaller section of the Red Roof Townhome. This will enable your child to turn the townhome into a shopping mall. You can then add further shops to the to your multitasking Townhome "mall" by buying a few of the individual store sets such as the gorgeous Town Chocolate Lounge set. It still is an awesome toy, despite the few glitches described above.

Buen producto

Got this for our daughter's birthday. She loves it!

Bought this for my niece, she loved it. Had great fun assembling and putting the stickers on. Does come with many small pieces, so be mindful of this when giving to younger children.

El producto llegó bien empacado y en excelentes condiciones

Muy lindo y detallado, trae muchos accesorios y detallitos. Súper buen regalo

Came as described

Llegó en buen estado, viene en caja con stickers en francés e inglés para los productos, requiere precisión para pegar los stickers en los mini productos, pero una vez armado se convierte en un escenario perfecto de un mini-supermercado! Ideal para coleccionar