Last christmas my daughters god father bought her this sweet shop which looking on the internet I have found costs around £10 and is available from amazon and I have also seen them in the bargain type shops such as Home bargains.

The sweet shop comes in quite a large cardboard box which you do need to keep to keep all the pieces in so storage was an issue and we finally found a shelf it would fit on if it stood on it's side. The box is pretty sturdy and nearly a year later it isn't damaged at all and still holds all the pieces.

Inside the box you find all the pieces for the sweet shop, all the pieces are made of strong plastic and are all brightly coloured. The main piece is green with a space at the back for the scales to fit in and two circular sections either side of the scales for 2 jars of sweets to fit into, there are 6 sections for sweets to sit in and the main part has a drawer for the money you will take in your shop. There are two side pieces which simply push up from underneath into the main piece, these are blue in colour and have places for more sweets and two holes on the back of each one for lollies to stand in. The scales have two pieces which sit together on the main piece and the scales actually do move when you place things in them. All the pieces are very strong and even with my daughters rough play there isn't any damage to any of the pieces.

To complete the set you get some pretend money, there are some notes which do get bent very easily and then there are coins in silver and gold. The toy comes complete with 4 lollies and 3 different lots of sweets, there are dolly mixtures minus the jellies, dolly mixture style jellies seperately and then some little jelly babies. The sweets seemed to dry out quite quickly after christmas so I did wonder how long they had been packaged and the lollies were pretty sticky like they go when they are past their best.

My daughter liked the idea of the sweet shop and after christmas she did like playing with it quite a bit however I am an evil mother and she has a ration of ten sweets per day so once she had weighed her ten sweets and paid for them she became bored quickly and the toy would be put away again. I think this toy would have been better for a child that has a sibling to play with or even some friends in the street but our street has no other children and her sister is too young to play with her.

This toy has quite quickly been forgotton about and it is one that will be removed on christmas eve, I removed the sweets that were in the toy and gave her sweets from her cupboard to play with which was also a pain as she would want more sweets than she was allowed to eat to make the shop look good but them they were getting handled and going in the bin. The shop is very brightly coloured and I think it's good for teaching about weight and money and the concept that we must pay for what we want but it just wasn't suitable for my daughter.

I recommend this for children who have another child to play with but I would recommend removing the sweets from inside as they certainly weren't very fresh.