Brass Armadillo Antique Mall - Kansas City — Local services in Grain Valley

As a vendor, this place is a dumpster fire.

I struggled to make more than 2x rent, they really don’t have the volume or clientele to support serious people, I.e. people who aren’t just selling stuff from their garage.

Their loss management is non existent. We lost at least 2-3 items per week. If you find something on your list of sales that shouldn’t be there because it was another vendors items, they will just shrug at you. Somehow a 4’ footlocker vanished from our booth. They claim they have cameras, but if they do, they never look at them.

The Manager, Bruce, is too erratic to and unprofessional to run a business with. We received a screaming angry phone call over the condition of a $5 stool at 9 AM on a Saturday. That is the one of 2 issues we ever had with Brass in the 2 years and $1200+ in monthly sales I had. The other one was a woman who bought some furniture and decided not to pick it up for over a week, claimed it was damaged, and demanded a refund. Brass has a no refund policy, but they gave her her money back. At the same time, and that is the only time this happened, a dozen or so things in our booth were marked nfs, as retaliation.

The only time I’ve seen that level of temper explosion with no provocation has been with alcoholics and drug users. Bruce’s truck is piled with trash to the point you couldn’t fit a bag of groceries in it so I assume he’s struggling with some sort of addiction issues.

Why the owners of Brass keep this guy in there as manager is beyond me. They can’t have any idea what is going on.

We have moved on to other antique malls as vendors and we generally do about 4x the volume of brass for about half the cost in rent. Almost every vendor in the other malls was in brass for a while and left. Similar issues - low sales to rent cost ratio, management makes up rules as they go, and are verbally abusive to the vendors.

Vendors - avoid, avoid, avoid. If you do go, invest as little as possible into your booth.

If you go in there after December, half their cases are empty, and they have several verdorless booths. They put filler in those booths so they don’t look empty, but the vacancies are substantial.

Until Bruce is removed and the owners take operation of Brass seriously, it will continue...

We are avid antique shoppers. We shop for antiques at least three times a week, and whenever we go on trips, we always make sure you go to as many antique malls as we possible can. This place was AH-MA-ZING! It’s the rare kind of place that is hard to come by in todays world. Most antique malls fall into two categories. The first is just peoples junk for cheap prices. (Essentially a glorified garage sale.) The second category offers real antiques, but everything is INCREDIBLY, laughable and pathetically over priced. However, this place falls right in the perfect, yummy middle, and gives you the best of both worlds. REAL antiques, that are also reasonably priced. We are not from the area, and were on a time crunch, but with the massive size of the mall, we could have easily spent two full business days there just exploring. We are talking about making a special trip from Dallas just to come here again— that’s how much we loved it! We will absolutely be back! Do yourself a favor and visit! (The only reason I gave four stars is because several of the employee’s kept YELLING at each other whenever they needed keys to unlock the merchandise cabinets, which was annoying when you are just trying to shop. And the gal who checked us out stopped mid-check out to have a full blown conversation with her grandmother who stopped by the store, which was also slightly annoying. The staff could definitely work on their customer service skills a little bit, but all in all, we had a good...

This used to be a good place but lately, not so good. My daughter and me were there last week and we ran across something we're seeing more and more of. One booth had a ghost figure for $5.00. I know where it came from. They bought it at Dollar Tree for $1.25. It's not an antique. It's not even old. We saw an "old" photograph of a couple of kids dressed for Halloween that was in a frame. The "photo" wasn't old. You can buy a pack of 10 of the same off of Amazon for $0.99. You can get a cheap frame from any hobby store of $1.99. The seller was wanting $5.00. We have run across several things like this in the past year. Personally, I view this as rather dishonest. We saw another item, some "old" body soap. It was old, yes, maybe a year old. It came from Bath and Body Works and sold there for $12.95. The seller wanted $15.00. The Franciscan ware that is available is way over priced given that the market is flooded with it. You can go to any "antique" store from here to Minnesota and find it. At best, the plates are worth $2.00-$3.00. Definitely not worth the price the sellers want for it. You can find the Rose, Ivy, and Apple everywhere. Which is why it's been sitting on the shelf for the past 3 or more years. Bottom line is that Brass Armadillo is becoming a flea market, not an...