Until recently this used to be a Brother Jimmy’s BBQ franchise store. This location is The Marketplace on the corner of Sand Lake Road and Dr. Phillip’s Blvd. It’s the third small business to come here and eventually die. The first was a Wich Wich sandwich stop, which lasted some number of years. I used to stop in and order sandwiches for my wife and I. It was a pretty nice place, and unique in how you ordered your sandwich/sub. You picked out the wrapper for you sandwich, and then checked boxes next to all the ingredients you wanted, then handed that over to the store staff who built you sandwich. I liked that process because I could pick out exactly what I wanted and know they would get it right. Wich Wich went out of business, followed by a Korean hamburger place, which didn’t last very long. Then came Jimmy’s.

I went to Jimmy’s once, back in 2021, for a supper meal pickup. It was the first and last time. The meal was expensive, the portions smaller than we anticipated, especially for what we paid, and the meal was greasy and not all that flavorful. We never went back. Based on my experience I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

This is a small section of The Marketplace, with three stores. On the left is a Chipotle that’s been there since it opened, and where my wife and I go when we are coming back from a morning doctor’s visit from downtown. To the right is the largest store by volume, which started out as a World of Beer bar, and is now yet another Korean BBQ place (yes, for a brief time, there were two BBQ stores side-by-side).

A lot of businesses have come into The Marketplace over the last 30 years, both big and small. Such is business in America, I suppose.

If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Especially if it comes as uninvited and unwelcomed junk mail. These two pieces came courtesy of Addition Financial, one to me and one to my wife. I’m not in the market to refinance a car loan, but I was curious just how good or bad this particular financial institution is. So I went Googling for “addition financial car loan review” and came up with this hit as the first in my search results — https://wallethub.com/profile/addition-financial-13307460i . The average is an amazingly low 2.3 out of 5 with 66 reviews. I did no filtering but there was a lot of 1 and 2 star ratings, with just a sprinkling of anything higher (such as 5 stars). I will say that someone at Additional Financial was trying to answer some of the complaints. But if it were me, I wouldn’t touch an unsolicited loan offer from these people with a 10 foot pole. Especially with asterisks ***

One other observation: There is a 1-888 number at the bottom to call and opt out of this kind of crap. When it showed up on another financial piece of junk mail I called it. The first thing the automated system asked for was my social security number. No thank you. It’s unfortunate but my SSN is probably all over the dark web and in other spammer databases, but I’m not going to make a bad situation worse by volunteering it up yet again. Why not ask for my address and zip code? Why not offer a web address? Needless to say as soon as the SSN was requested I hung up. My revenge will be to check their reviews on the web and report about them. The worse the reviews, the better.