And the winner is ...

I'm so excited to be able to do for you what The Shops of Grand River did for me, which is to give one of you a $50 gift card to spend there!

Actually, that makes it sound like I paid for the gift card, which I didn't. They ALSO gave me the one to give away to you. Generous, they are. AND all decked out for the holidays right now!

Before I announce the winner, I do want to tell you some of the things I loved most about my first shopping experience there ...

• I was really impressed with the friendliness of the store employees. We ran in and out of several stores while completing our little scavenger hunts, which were part of our experience that day. Everyone treated us very nicely, but the salespeople really took it to another level once we started shopping. And we weren't identified as bloggers ... they didn't know who we were. They were just genuinely nice people.
• The property is really attractive. I know that's kind of a shallow observation, but if I'm going to do spend time somewhere for a few hours, I don't want to be disgusted when I look around. No danger of that at Grand River!
• The food court -- where we only stopped to get drinks and use the restrooms -- is really large and features an entire wall of windows. You don't feel like you're in the middle of an enclosed mall ... because you're not. It's actually a nice place to stop, get your bearings, quench your thirst and head back out for more shopping.
• And speaking of the restrooms, they are EASILY the cleanest I've ever seen at a mall. There are plenty of them, they are clean, they were well-stocked with TP the day I was there, and they have those really, really powerful hand dryers.

All that to say, I loved shopping there and absolutely plan to go back!

Right now, as I mentioned, it's decorated for the holidays, and they're in the middle of their holiday laser light show. It runs nightly through New Year's Eve, and I hope to take our kids out there to enjoy it before it ends.

store map and directory

Now without further ado, the winner of the $50 gift card is ...

K   A   T   I   E   !

Note: There were 30 actual entrants, but only 22 were visible on the blog, because Disqus ate all eight of the Blogger-based comments (and Katie's was one of those). However, I kept them all in my email inbox, so I used 30 as the base number for the Random Integer Generator.