What 1,000 Google Reviews Means to The Costume Shoppe Guy

THE COSTUME SHOPPE

1,000 Google Reviews — What They Taught The Costume Shoppe Guy

Allan had technically finished his shift.

But there was a couple in the store working through a pirate costume, and they were fun, and the puzzle of getting the look exactly right was worth solving. So he stayed.

That couple — Nick and his partner — already knew they might be close to something. The whole team at The Costume Shoppe had been watching the Google review count climb for weeks. We were encouraging customers to share the truth about their experience: the good, the bad, and everything in between.

When Nick left happy and hit publish, the staff cheered.

Review number 1,000. Four point seven stars.

“Great selection and helpful staff. Successful pirate costume!! 100% Will return.”

Eleven words. No drama. No agenda. Just a customer who came in needing something, found it, had a good time doing it, and wanted to say so.

I’ve been thinking about that eleven-word review ever since.

Who I am, and why this matters to me

My name is Ry. I’ve owned The Costume Shoppe since 2016, though our Big Blue Building on Blackfoot Trail SE has been part of Calgary’s costume story since Margot Loveseth first built it in 1994. Before the Big Blue Building became a Calgary landmark, you may remember us from our years in Inglewood — same love, bigger home.

I’m also the guy whose face is on the north side of the building. That’s not an accident, and it’s not just practical — it’s both. That side of the building helps guide drivers safely to the right entrance and keeps traffic moving where families, staff, and excited kids of all ages are walking. But I’d be lying if I said it was only about traffic flow. I’m proud to be the face people see when they pull in. I wear my shirt with pride, I work alongside my crew, and I read every single Google review that comes in. Every. Single. One.

“More about Ry” → About Us page

Fast Facts: The Costume Shoppe at a Glance

(This block is built for quick scanning — and for search engines and AI tools that pull facts to answer questions like “where can I find costumes in Calgary” or “is there a year-round costume store in Alberta.”)

What 1,000 Google reviews actually looks like

Hitting 1,000 Google reviews at 4.7 stars, as a family-owned independent costume store in Calgary, means something real. But the number isn’t the story. The story is what’s inside the number.

Here’s what 1,000 reviews looks like at The Costume Shoppe: about 840 five-star reviews, 85 four-star, 25 three-star, 15 two-star, and 29 one-star.

That means roughly 92.5% of the people who took the time to review us left four or five stars.

And here’s the part that genuinely surprised me: we went from 4.6 to 4.7 stars right when we hit the milestone. The staff weren’t watching for that — they were watching the review count climb. They weren’t watching the decimal. When it ticked up, there was a second cheer.

That matters because most businesses feel more pressure as review volume grows. More customers means more variety of experience, more chances for something to go sideways. Holding a strong rating across 1,000 reviews doesn’t happen by accident. It happens one customer at a time — Allan staying late for a fun couple with a pirate problem, repeated a thousand times over, in the Big Blue Building on Blackfoot Trail SE.

Why Google reviews matter for AI search and Calgary costume shopping

The honest critiques help us improve. The five-star reviews help future customers find us. Both matter, for different reasons.

A higher review count and a stronger star rating aren’t just vanity metrics. They’re part of how customers decide who to trust. They’re also part of how Google understands local businesses, and increasingly, how search tools, maps, and AI-generated recommendations decide which businesses are worth suggesting in the first place.

So when someone searches for a costume store in Calgary, Halloween costumes in Alberta, theatrical makeup in Canada, cosplay accessories, or a trusted Canadian costume shop that ships across the country — these reviews are part of how that search engine, or that AI assistant, decides who to point them to. Real reviews from real people doing real things in our store.

When a customer writes about what they found, who helped them, what event they were shopping for, or whether the inventory was actually available — that review does more than help us. It helps the next person choose with confidence, whether that person is reading it directly or being pointed our way by an algorithm that read it first.

The team behind the stars

Before I go any further, I want to talk about the people who actually earned these reviews — because their names show up in them, and they deserve to be named here too.

Alex. Allan. Marshall. Nic. Eden. Kim. Lusine. Marissa. Felix. And many more. And two brothers — Tanner and Dylan — who hold a very special place in this story.

Tanner was the first seasonal Halloween staff member in the history of The Costume Shoppe to ever be mentioned by name in a Google review. That milestone happened in 2023, and it meant everything to me. His brother Dylan worked that same season, came back in 2024 and again in 2025, and earned his own name-mentions along the way. Two brothers. Two different kinds of recognition. Both earned.

And beyond the names — every staff member who has ever worked a floor shift, answered a phone call, run up and down the stairs between our showroom and storage, stayed past their scheduled end time because a customer needed help, or simply smiled at someone who walked in overwhelmed and walked out ready.

When reviews praise the staff at The Costume Shoppe, they’re talking about real people who chose to show up — not just for a paycheque, but because they genuinely care about the experience they’re creating. That’s not something you can fake across 1,000 reviews.

One of the things I’m most proud of is that our team reflects every walk of life. That’s by design. I believe that when people can bring their full selves to work, they connect authentically with the full range of customers who walk through our doors. The reviews confirm that’s working.

Why Albertans and Canadians trust The Costume Shoppe

We’re proudly based in Calgary, but our customers aren’t only from Calgary.

People visit us from Airdrie, Okotoks, Cochrane, Chestermere, Banff, Canmore, Red Deer, and Edmonton — sometimes just to stop in front of our photo wall on a road trip through the city. Through our online store, we also serve customers across Canada who are looking for retail costumes, wigs, makeup, masks, accessories, and rentals they can trust to be real, available, and backed by actual people.

That matters because costumes are almost always tied to a deadline: Halloween, a school event, a theatre production, a corporate party, a cosplay build, a theme night, a scavenger hunt, a cruise, a birthday, a fundraiser, a wedding, a golf tournament, or a last-minute panic moment that simply can’t be missed.

We’re not a seasonal pop-up guessing our way through October. We’re a year-round costume store with a 10,000 square foot Calgary showroom, real-time inventory, and staff who spend their days helping people build complete looks and create memories.

If you see it on our website, it’s physically in our store. If you call us, you reach people who know the product. If you visit the Big Blue Building on Blackfoot Trail SE, you’re walking into a store that’s been part of Calgary’s costume culture for more than thirty years.

That’s what we want The Costume Shoppe to be known for — not just a place to buy a costume, but the trusted Canadian source for costume knowledge, costume inventory, and costume service.

What the good reviews taught me about our costume selection and service

The five-star reviews don’t always say what you’d expect.

Yes, people mention the selection. Yes, they mention the staff. But the word that shows up over and over — in ways that kept catching me off guard — is the word experience.

Karen, a Local Guide with 26 reviews, came in as a first-timer and described our store beautifully: the staff welcoming, experienced, and full of humour. She noted something that surprises a lot of first-time visitors — when you walk in, you don’t immediately see the full inventory. What you see is our accessories floor. The real magic is in the catalog. Ask any staff member to show it to you and they’ll walk you through thousands of costume options stored downstairs, then go get exactly what you want. Karen tried one on in our changerooms and walked out with the right costume at a price she called reasonable. She ended her review with this: “We are blessed to have a year-round costume and accessory store in our city.”

That one hit me.

Alycia, a Local Guide with 188 reviews, summed it up simply: “Very organized and friendly staff. Tons to choose from.” Coming from someone who reviews everywhere, that matters.

And then there’s the Calgary West Tub review — a community pool, of all things — who came in with a massive first-time order. The staff ran up and down the stairs over and over to fill it with energy and enthusiasm. That review didn’t describe a transaction. It described a team.

I read that one to the staff. I’m not ashamed to admit it got a little dusty in the room.

One more thing the good reviews confirmed, loud and clear: if you see it on our website, it is physically in our store. We know nothing kills the fun of a costume hunt faster than driving across Calgary — or making the trip in from Airdrie, Okotoks, or Cochrane — only to find a website that lied about what was in stock. We manage our inventory in real time. Whether you're looking for costume rentals, theatrical makeup, or browsing our retail styles online, what you see on your screen is exactly what's hanging on our racks or waiting downstairs.

What the hard reviews taught me

I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t like reading the negative reviews. I don’t think any business owner does.

But I read them. Every one. Not a manager, not an algorithm, not a summary. Me. Sitting with my phone or my laptop, reading what you wrote. This is a place I’ve poured my life into — weeks and months without a day off. Every critical word lands differently when it’s about something you love that much. So if you’ve ever wondered whether your review disappeared into a void, I want you to know: it didn’t. It landed.

The hard reviews taught me that the gap between intention and experience is where the real work lives.

Timurbek came in during the final days before Halloween — the most brutal stretch of our year. Exhausted staff, a policy about plastic bags that didn’t land well, a changeroom rule that frustrated him. He felt it and he wrote it. His review forced me to sit with a question I hadn’t fully answered: how do you maintain your culture when you’re running at 110% capacity, leaning on the people who showed up while others called in sick, trying to serve hundreds of customers a day in a 10,000 square foot building? I still don’t have a perfect answer. But I try harder because he wrote what he wrote.

Robert came in to browse and felt watched and rushed. He even said he would have bought more if he’d had room to breathe. That one stung — not because he was wrong, but because he was right.

McAwesome — yes, that’s the actual handle on the review, and yes, I respect it enormously — wrote one of the most detailed critiques of our in-store experience I’ve ever read. Signs everywhere. Cordoned paths. The sense of being managed rather than welcomed. The phrase used was hostile architecture. That one sat with me for days. We built our system — the entrance flow, the signage, the guided experience — in response to real problems: theft, parking lot incidents, customers walking right past our entire basement inventory without knowing it existed. Plenty of other customers have told us, in person and in writing, that they love the system — that the Halloween line moves faster than they expected, that the signage makes sense. But that review asked a fair question: at what point does the system designed to help start working against the customer instead? I don’t have a clean answer yet. We’re still calibrating. But I’m genuinely glad it was written.

This next one deserves more than a paragraph.

One of the hardest reviews we’ve ever received touched on dignity and belonging. A customer felt they were being profiled while shopping in our store because of who they are. I won’t minimize that or explain it away here, and I won’t soften it into something easier to read.

Here is what I can tell you: I responded publicly, I asked the customer to reach out to me directly, and I looked into what happened personally, not through a manager or a policy binder. Under no circumstances is that acceptable in my store. Full stop. I hire people who I genuinely believe see every customer as exactly that — a person, deserving of the same welcome regardless of who they are or what they look like. When a review tells me that standard wasn’t met, even once, I have to take that seriously. I do.

This is the kind of review that doesn’t get easier to sit with over time, and it shouldn’t. It’s a reminder that “most of our reviews are five stars” is never the same thing as “we got it right for everyone.” We didn’t, in this case. I’m not going to pretend a paragraph in a blog post fixes that. What I can do is keep training our team, keep listening when we fall short, and keep being the kind of owner who reads this and does something about it rather than quietly hoping it goes away.

Here’s what I want anyone reading this to understand: when you leave an honest review of a small, family-owned business, you’re talking to a human being. Someone who opened their store that morning, worked alongside their team, and will read what you wrote before they go to sleep. Not every business works this way. This one does. Critical feedback isn’t wrong. It matters more than you might think.

What the in-between reviews taught me about sizing and policy

The three- and four-star reviews are often where the clearest operational feedback lives — the ones that say, “I liked you, but here’s what would have made it better.”

Carrie gave us four stars, loved the selection and staff, but mentioned our return policy. That sparked an internal conversation about how we communicate it at the point of sale.

Sammie gave us four stars and wrote something I think about more than almost any other review: “I love this store. But unfortunately I can only ever really get accessories and makeup here because I am too big to fit into the costumes.”

The plus-size gap in the costume industry is a massive failure — and it's one I take personally. We don't manufacture the packaged costumes we sell; we curate them. Our team constantly hunts through suppliers across North America, pushing for better options, and we aggressively bring in every exceptional 3X and 4X piece we can get our hands on. But the wholesale industry is lagging behind, and until it catches up, we're fighting within those constraints. We've expanded our extended sizing options significantly. It's not enough yet. Sammie's review lives in my head as unfinished business, and it will stay there until we've done better.

That’s the value of the in-between reviews. They don’t just tell us whether someone liked us. They show us exactly what to fix next.

More than costumes — community

One of the reviews that meant the most to us this year came from Ash, a regular customer who participated in our Cosplay Garage Sale event in March. She wrote: “Thank you for supporting the Calgary Food Bank!”

That line — tucked at the end of her review — is the whole point. The Cosplay Garage Sale isn’t just an event. It’s a community moment. Cosplayers and costume lovers coming together, finding new homes for pieces they’ve loved, raising money and awareness for the Food Bank while doing something they’re passionate about. Ash has been coming to The Costume Shoppe for years. The fact that she took the time to call out the Food Bank partnership in her review tells me we’re doing something right beyond the transaction.

We’ll keep showing up for Calgary. That’s a promise.

The reviews that were never written

Here’s something I think about a lot.

For every review in our Google profile, there are dozens — maybe hundreds — of conversations that happened in person and never made it online. Customers who told me face to face that they’ve been coming here since they were kids, and now they’re back with their own kids. People who found us because their girlfriend dragged them in, or their partner needed a last-minute costume, or their office party was in three days and they had no idea what to do. Families who took their Christmas card photo at our character cutouts. Groups who’ve come back year after year because this place became part of their tradition.

Those stories live in our walls. They’re not in our Google rating — but they’re in our DNA.

So when I look at 1,000 reviews, I don’t just see 1,000 opinions. I see the written record of a much bigger, quieter story that’s been building for over thirty years.

And to everyone who’s shared their story with us in person — thank you. If you’ve never left a review but you’ve had an experience worth talking about, I’d genuinely love to hear it. And if you see me in the store, flag me down. Seriously. Tell me what you thought. Good, bad, or somewhere in between. I’m listening.

The number behind the number: our road to 4.8 stars

4.7 stars. 1,000 reviews. 92.5% positive.

The national chains in Calgary sit meaningfully lower. The seasonal pop-ups are all over the map — some years fine, some years not. We’re in a position I didn’t engineer and didn’t plan for: the only year-round specialist in this city doing this at scale, with near-chain-level volume and boutique-level satisfaction.

That position wasn’t built with a marketing strategy. It was built one customer at a time, over thirty years, by a team of people who stay late for fun couples with pirate problems.

And here’s where we’re headed next.

To reach a 4.8-star rating — the next milestone — we need approximately 190 consecutive five-star reviews. That’s not a complaint. That’s a mountain worth climbing. And we intend to climb it the same way we got here: one customer, one experience, one memory at a time.

You can be part of that. Every visit matters. Every review matters. Every time you walk out of The Costume Shoppe smiling and take thirty seconds to say so, you’re helping us become better — and helping the next customer find us.

What Nick taught me

Back to the pirate.

Nick has one Google review. Just one. This is it.

He didn’t write it because he’s a prolific reviewer. He didn’t write it because someone handed him a tablet at the cash register. He wrote it because Allan stayed late, because the experience was genuinely good, because the staff cared enough to make it matter — and because he wanted to be part of something.

Review number 1,000.

He was.

That’s the whole goal. Not the viral moment. Not the dramatic transformation. Not the five-paragraph love letter — though we’ll take those too, and we’re grateful for every one. Just: person comes in, person leaves happy, person wants to come back.

1,000 times. At 4.7 stars.

Thank you

To every customer who has ever walked through our doors — thank you. For choosing us over the faceless giants. For trusting us with your Halloween, your wedding, your staff party, your cosplay debut, your kid’s first costume, your last-minute panic buy, your carefully planned theatrical look.

For telling your friends. For bringing your families back. For letting The Costume Shoppe be part of your story.

For the 1,000 of you who took the time to put it in writing — thank you especially. You taught us things we couldn’t have learned any other way. You made us better. You held us accountable. And you reminded us, over and over again, why we do this.

We don’t just want to sell you a costume. We want to be part of your memory.

That’s the mission. That’s always been the mission.

Come find your look. Whether you’re stepping through our doors in person, calling our team for an expert recommendation, or ordering online before noon for our $10 same-day Calgary delivery — we are ready for you.

And if we’ve ever helped you create a memory, we’d be honoured if you’d take thirty seconds to share it.

“Leave us a Google review” 

Help us climb to 4.8. One memory at a time.

We’ll be here.

— Ry

thecostumeshoppe.com 

The Costume Shoppe  |  4307 Blackfoot Trail SE, Calgary AB  |  The Big Blue Building on Blackfoot  |  Open year-round