WALKER, Mich. — The new Cheesecake Factory chain restaurant now open in the Woodland Mall is both a blessing and a curse for a bakery on Alpine Avenue in Walker.
The Grand Rapids Cheesecake Company - a bakery - is getting dozens of calls every day from people trying to reach the Cheesecake Factory to make restaurant reservations.
“I probably get 30 calls a night,” says the Grand Rapids Cheesecake Company employee Parker Bennett.
The bakery staff says it’s a pain to answer all those wrong numbers, but the owner says it is also bringing them new business.
“We just tell them about our wonderful products made here and we get a lot of people to come this way,” says Grand Rapids Cheesecake Company owner Mark Datema. “It’s great.”
Datema says the first listing when people search online for Grand Rapids cheesecake is his Walker bakery. He suspects people click call without realizing they are contacting the bakery and not the Cheesecake Factory.
“They have given us a lot of free advertising,” he says. “We are constantly going to the phone to answer it, but it has brought us a lot of new business. I will take those calls all day long.”
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