Since 1985 there has been one ballroom dance supplier in Northern California that seems to have occluded all others, and that is Ballroom Dance Supply (BDS) of Campbell, California. This store has a gargantuan collection of ballroom dance shoes, a huge selection of recorded ballroom dance music and a ballroom gown closet where used ballroom gowns may be bought and sold on consignment. BDS also carries their own line of dance wear for ladies.
As a West Coast Swing dancer, and a guy, my only interest in this store was their men’s shoe selection, and, I must admit, it is huge and impressive. Naturally, it is balanced heavily towards ballroom dance tastes, but there is a wide selection of rhythm and Latin shoes, many of which make great choices for West Coast Swing dancers. In addition, there is a vast selection of ladies’ shoes of every style, and BDS offers stoning supplies too, for adding additional glam to plainer shoes.
As the business name implies, BDS offers much of what the competitive ballroom dancer needs. The only downside of this store is the owner, Bill Rowe. Bill is man with no people skills whatsoever, much less those required to run a high-end retail establishment. Things like good manners are not a consideration for him.
Furthermore, he uses his store as a platform from which to communicate his outlandish and rabid political beliefs, which can make intelligent members of the voting public uncomfortable, to say the least. The problem is that much of the “political” insight that his print material offers is nothing more than poorly conceived conspiracy theory, still bitter about and un-accepting of the fact that George W. Bush won the national election twice. It is true, this was contested, and the contest was reasonably resolved with a ridiculous number of re-counts and considerations for the inability of voters to use simple punch-card voting machines.
I will grant, this made a great scandal in its day, and that George Bush will never be remembered as being among the greatest of US presidents, but it is over now.
In addition to having his paranoid political beliefs in print, scattered about the register area, and covering his website, there is Bill’s basic inability to be polite. At the time that I went in, many of the men’s shoes were not out, but the boxes were there. I carefully selected boxes in my size and pulled them out from the stacks. I opened a couple of them to examine the shoes, I re-packed them exactly as they had been, and I carefully returned them to the stack in the places where I found them. When he saw me daring to look at the shoes, he snapped, “Do not open the boxes!” There was no explanation, perfunctory or otherwise, no “please” nor “thank you”, just the command not to do it.
I have read stories in other reviews where people went in to purchase shoes for a wedding party, ready to drop a good sum of cash, only to be told that BDS was not in the wedding shoe business, and to be sent on their way.
I suspect that Bill enjoys the reputation of being the Northern California “Dance Nazi”, or some such, but in this day and age of the Internet, there is no need to deal with creatures such as this. Though he may be skilled at fitting dance shoes, the only ones that I ever got there were poorly fit, and, in later years, I learned how they should properly fit. While Ballroom Dance Supply does offer a spectacular selection of products, and while I do like to support local small businesses, I qualify that by saying that I like to support good quality local small businesses. The great selection offered at BDS is entirely undermined by horrific customer service, and the fact that the place is run by a truly awful human being. Since my interest lies in swing and tango styles of shoes, even with their stellar selection, BDS is of limited use to me, so I have limited attachment to this icon of Northern California ballroom dance, and, for that reason, I can say that this is a business that truly deserves to go out of business. It would be better if Bill simply sold it at a tidy profit to a sane person who likes people.
