Chainstore Check

Dunnes is the anchor store in the Crumlin Shopping Centre, around which its departments are spread in individual units. It shares the centre with banks, a pharmacy, some pound shops, a bakery, etc. This is not a prosperous area and the shopping centre shows no signs of the Celtic spending spree filling many of the capital's other malls, but it was relatively busy, largely with women and young families.

The clothing department here has the basic trappings of Dunnes Stores everywhere - blond wood flooring, grey carpeting, staff in blue uniforms. At the door, one is greeted by a rack of umbrellas (!) and some end-of-sale stock.

While the flooring was clean and practical, other necessary furnishings were unimpressive. I could find only one set of mirrors - cladding a central pillar - and those did not stretch to the ground. Meanwhile, there are no display units higher than approximately chest height, which means the outlook across the wide, square-shaped department is rather bleak. This effect is heightened by rather flat lighting and a ceiling that struck me as particularly high. Such dreariness was reflected in the stock, too: there seemed a preponderance of blues, greys and whites, and of sports wear. The fact that the store was at the tail-end of a sale might, I suppose, go some way to explaining this.

The staff, while friendly, answered all my questions about stock with what I have come to term the WYSIWWHIS (what-you-see-is-what-we-have-in-stock). However, I did overhear one member of staff offering to ring another store to ask after a pair of children's shoes, and this was the first time I have witnessed such assistance anywhere in the present series. They were very busy - I felt they were running to stay still in terms of rearranging and restocking, which might explain the disarray in some areas; the shoe racks, for instance, and the underwear.

The store has two changing cubicles for which, not surprisingly, there was a queue. They had new carpets, long mirrors and double, well-fitting curtains, but just one hook by way of further furnishing and they could have done with a vacuum and a spray of air freshener, tucked away as they are in an airless corner of the room. All in all this is an uninspiring place - the impression given is that it was decked out in the Dunnes livery and then left to its own devices. While the staff were friendly, they were not helpful, and while the store was clean, it was not tidy. Marks out of 10: 41/2.