Another Delusional Store Owner Without a Lick of Business Acumen or Common Sense

Cindy Busby, a small-town girl, runs her dead mother’s general store which is going bankrupt. Her Dad calls her ex-boyfriend, a New York City wunderkind who specializes in saving businesses from failure, to come home and help them keep the store from failing. For free. Cindy resists all of his sensible advice until she doesn’t. She won’t even move the candy away from the front door where shoplifters and moochers can reach in and steal it. Because God forbid the elderly patron has to step into the store, pass what tempting merchandise there is, and go to the register to actually pay for her candy. Oh no, her not having to cross the threshold to get her Snickers is the “highlight of her day.” How dare he suggest customers have to pay for their merchandise?! He is a hard-hearted capitalist and all he cares about is money and profit. I kid you not. This store owner’s father has a heart attack from the financial stress and he is about ready to use his life savings to keep the store afloat. She is totally unaware that there is not enough cash to pay the bills, college for her young sister costs money, and an online presence is not an instrument of the devil. She is a menace to her family and the business.

It is easy to see that it didn’t take a marketing genius to save the store, which had little to offer customers except for the 10 bags of Cheetos and 15 cartons of oatmeal that were skillfully arranged on the otherwise empty shelves. What finally saves the store is her getting hit with a clue-stick that her fellow townspeople can use the store to sell their own homemade products from BBQ sandwiches to baked goods to art. Let’s hope she understands that she gets to take a cut of their revenue without being a greedy moneygrubber. A real go-getter of a business owner would have realized this years ago. An energetic ten-year-old playing with their “Little Tykes Let’s Go Shopping” play store would have done a better job of merchandising.

I usually like Cindy Busby, but her character in this one was so technophobic, ignorant, unpleasant, and stubborn my eyeballs practically fell out of my head from all of the eye-rolling.

The only other aspect I want to comment on is the weirdness of the way they groomed the hero. His colorless hair was slicked back from his pale forehead in a way that would only be acceptable if he had had a ponytail. but since men with ponytails are verboten on Hallmark, He looked like a dang Nazi. He’s probably a nice enough-looking guy in real life, but he was downright creepy-looking in this.

Also, this movie is in IMDb under Hearts of Down Under. I think someone confused this with another Cindy Busby Hallmark that actually was set in Australia, Hearts Down Under, now called Romance on the Menu. Somebody really screwed up.

September 21, 2020