World Market — Attraction in Durham

Best place in town to get: at least some kinds of cookware and kitchen stuff. Woks, wine glasses, cast iron, paella pans, oil bottles for the kitchen, sushi plates, are all very reasonable and decent quality for everyday living.

Very good place to get wine or beer. A wide selection of both are available in the store, reasonably priced relative to the quality once again. Not the place to get $100 bottles of imported French Bordeaux, perhaps, but they have good deals on excellent California and imported wines in the $10 to $30 price range (which is all I generally feel comfortable paying anyway). Lots of craft beers as well, at close to standard market price.

Very good place to get gourmet coffee or gourmet foods. Comparable to Southern Season -- a slightly smaller selection but better prices on what they have.

A good place to get, or at least look at, certain kinds of furniture -- tables and chairs, sometimes chests or end tables. Rugs, curtains, home furnishings of various sorts. We've bought all of this from them at one time or another. If you like things like incense burners, Buddhas or Ganeshes, meditation pieces, imported Indian bangles and other simple jewelry, scarves -- it's worth shopping them and sometimes one can get neat stuff for small money.

A good place to get "interesting" mostly imported toys, as well, of the small and junky variety. Rubber duckies. Kazoos or recorders. Small plastic games.

As you can tell, part of the appeal of shopping the store is its highly individualized and eclectic nature. Pier One is trying to be Pottery Barn and gets boring quickly if they don't have what you are specifically looking for. World Market, OTOH, is always entertaining. If my wife is shopping for curtains, I can look at the wines or cookware or for a tasty specialty treat for dinner or for a cool toy for my grandson, while if I'm going there to get a wok, she can scope out scarves or cards or area rugs. There's always SOMETHING interesting or appealing for sale.

As for the human employees (which obviously did not seem to sit well with some of the other reviewers) -- remember that squeaky wheels are the ones most likely to post, and yeah, the employees are human and therefore imperfect. With that said, we shop there a LOT and well over 90% of the time the staff are helpful and knowledgeable or inobtrusive as one might prefer them to be. Their wine person has saved me empty craft beer boxes to take home and use in my own craft brewing, for example, and has gone out of her way to find specific wines I like and add them to their inventory. We've bought curtains there and had them just not work and they've taken them back without a blink. The register operators are usually friendly and careful as they ring up and wrap breakable purchases.

The negative experiences we've had there don't even merit the removal of one point of one star in this review of one of the Durham stores I genuinely...

Called looking for a moon chair. Oh wait, nobody knows what that is. The papisan chair. Was able to put one on hold. Great. Drive an hour away to pick it up and find the floor model one to be a dark color which I prefer. Take the cushion up to the front and tell them I have a papisan base on hold. Everyone seemed confused about that fact and took a little bit to figure out that someone in fact called and put it on hold. Asked if I could buy the floor model (which does in fact have a price tag on it, which in my retail experience of it has a price it can be bought) and the manager, Jason I believe shook his head and said he can’t sell his floor model giving me some excuse as to why he couldn’t sell it. I took the lighter colored one because I had no choice basically. If you can’t sell a floor item, put a “not for sale” sign on it, not a sale tag. And also, don’t treat the customer like a baby who doesn’t know anything. I just left the Greensboro world market where customers bought the floor model, which was the last one and is what brought me an hour away. The whole experience sucked, I will never shop here again, and the management is rude. The cashier was nice, I didn’t get his name but he was absolutely fine. The female up front wearing the grey sweater was also somewhat rude. Not as rude as the older gentlemen who I believe is “Jason.” Very condescending, not willing to work with me at all. But it doesn’t matter now since I already gave them what they wanted: my money. And for the record, it’s the older white guy with the short grey hair. I came in on January 5th at...

People raved on about world markets for years and I was really let down when I finally got to go there. I thought it was a bit basic and a bit lacking. The prices were all over the place but there was so many things That didn’t have any prices on them, so that was a bit of a turn off. The reason for three stars is mainly because the restrooms were Disgusting. Not just dirty but there was not one paper products in there at all no toilet paper, nothing for your hands, just nothing. They weren’t that busy and they had enough staff that someone could’ve checked. The worst was when we checked out and I told the cashier and he looked at me with a completely vacant expression. I said I’ve told you this so that you could tell someone who could maybe fix that situation and he just carried on staring at me. So you all are on...