Open thread 10/14/22
The only one of these I don’t recall is Burdines, which apparently was located solely in Florida:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
The only one of these I don’t recall is Burdines, which apparently was located solely in Florida:
The “More” part helps to understand why so many other stores are missing, because they are in an earlier episode. Both my grandmothers worked at department stores, different ones, and those store brands are gone. The grocery store brand I worked at in High School and was considered unbeatable when they celebrated their 25th anniversary of operations didn’t quite make 50 years.
Did not know that Gimbel’s originally started in Indiana!
I was so sad when Lord and Taylor’s died. I really liked shopping there. I doubt the online version is the same. Ditto Marshall-Fields (from the first video.) The death of Mervyn’s was also sad. I shopped there a lot.
Hudson’s had a gorgeous building in Detroit, and I really think it could’ve been renovated into something. But instead, it was torn down.
Shillito’s, Rikes, Lazarus, Bluck’s, Ayers, Buffums Bullocks, I. Magnin, G. Fox, Wanamaker’s, Pogue’s… A bunch of stores a remember from my childhood, traveling with my parents, or just from where we lived. All gone.
Federated/Macy’s did a lot to destroy department stores and Amazon, Walmart, and the Federal Government shipping all our manufacturing to China, delivered the death blow.
For REDACTED and any others interested, following up from the PayPal thread I set up a GabPay account and made a purchase from the Gab store. It all seems to work.
Registration was simple enough.
Linking to a bank using the automated method failed for me. So I used the manual system, which worked fine but takes 24 hours or so to complete. The manual method is probably a bit more secure in any case.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they (Gab) provide the front end, but all the money stuff and security is handled by a professional third party firm. It all feels very similar to other online financial stuff I’ve come across.
I saw a cute PayPal-related meme. It showed an image of the online form where someone is closing their account and you see Sorry To See You Go at the top and then there are choices for why you are leaving.
The person has selected Other, with a note “In order to save $2500” which is the penalty PayPal will hit you with if you violate their terms of service regarding “hate speech” and “misinformation”.
I remember going to the Hudson’s downtown store (as in the earlier video) when I was a kid. Something like 15 floors. The demise of most blue hell downtowns (and flight to the suburbs) was probably the biggest factor in the early demise of these stores, explaining why Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, et al still survive in Manhattan, and Nordstrom and Neiman-Marcus in San Francisco, though NY and SF are doing their best to destroy themselves. It seems like Amazon will kill them all eventually.
Off the top of my head . . . Woodward & Lothrop in Washington DC and both Hutzler’s and Hochschild-Kohn in Baltimore — I’ll imagine those may have been spotlighted in the first installment of the series.
MONKEY WARDS!!
and
Sears
I keep being reminded of that first MTV song…Video killed the radio star. Only now transformed into… Amazon killed the shopping mall
“Top of mind” is suddenly a thing: High prices remain top of mind for many Americans in the last quarter of a year marked by across-the-board volatility in food, gasoline and energy costs. The first time I heard it was in reference to Biden’s “Where’s Jackie?” gaff. Or perhaps I’m just noticing it for the first time.
SHIREHOME (2:47 pm),
Montgomery Ward (“Monkey Ward’s”) appears to have closed down entirely, but Sears (Sears, Roebuck & Co.) appears to still have a much-reduced number of stores open.
https://www.sears.com/
And if you grew up in southern California as I did, you had The Akron, White Front, Builder’s Emporium, Fedco, Robinson’s, Silverwoods, Zachary All, and others too numerous to mention, plus the aforementioned Bullocks and Buffums.
Buffum’s was a small (8 stores?) southern California chain that is probably best known as the family business that Dorothy Buffum Chandler was born into. She was one of the benefactors of the L.A. music Center.
25 years ago Ralph Story did a special on KCET, then the local PBS outlet in Los Angeles called “Things That Aren’t Here Anymore,” and followed that up a year or two later with “More Things That Aren’t Here Anymore.”
Hess’s
Penn Traffic
Jamesway
Ben Franklin
Wanamaker’s
Strawbridge & Clothier
Filene’s
Unkel Joe’s Woodshed (one location remaining)
but Ollie’s Bargain Barn is still growing and adding locations!
Shoprite in new jersey in the 70s i worked for wooleys (fleming supermarket) in south florida
The original Shopper’s World in Framingham, Massachusetts was one of the first suburban shopping malls, and it had a Jordan Marsh and a Filene’s, if I remember my trips there (with my grandmother) correctly. I was but a wee tot at the time. The futuristic mall was rather famous – It even has its own wiki page.
It isn’t even mentioned in this video, but the giant among all of these is Sears, and their sad demise is painful to watch – essentially now a real estate / property liquidation company. That’s an original, heavily-muscled appendage propping up a corner of American culture, now withering up and dropping off as dust. What a shame .
Then there was Lechmere Sales on the east coast. You filled out an order slip from the thick catalog in the lobby, gave it to the clerk and paid up, and then your box would come rolling down the conveyor at the other side of the lobby, for pickup. No money spent on showrooms!
Finally: Who among us has been to Spag’s? Once you went to Spag’s, shopping anywhere else was never as much excitement and fun.
Actor, Robbie Coltrane, has died. I didn’t know that he took his last name from jazz legend, John Coltrane.
Probably most people know him as Hagrid from the “Harry Potter” movies. But it was his role on the British show, “Cracker,” about a brilliant criminal psychologist whose personal life was a complete addictive mess, that put Coltrane on my map.
There was no one like him. His appearances were always a treat, no matter what he was in.
I miss G.C. Murphy and Woolworth’s from my Florida childhood.
With my first allowance, I remember going to both stores and shopping so very carefully for the Right Ballpoint Pen. I settled on a Papermate, slightly upscale but it had a nice feel in my hand and I was worth it.
I remember when I first moved to Seattle, the downtown Bon Marche still had an enormous model railroading department. A year or two later, it was gone. The Bon became Macy’s years ago and now the flagship downtown store is an Amazon office.
A Sears catalog sales distribution building was near the stadiums. It is a Starbucks office now. Adjacent to it was the Milwaukee Road’s Stacy Street Yard now a BNSF intermodal facility.
I’ll bet plenty here remember whiling away the hours, perusing the latest Sears Catalog.
I was very annoyed when Macy’s took over Marshall Field’s and Dayton’s. They should have kept the names intact. Both of those stores stood for high end quality in the Upper Midwest, and Macy’s was just the people who sponsored that parade in New York.
New York really doesn’t count for much, outside of New York. Certainly not as much as they think they do.
One of the places that is no more is Pay ‘n Pak. I remember they sponsored the only turbine powered unlimited hydroplane at that time. The crash of the Pay ‘n Pak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nT7q8__bUs
The elevators at Bullock’s Wilshire! Even as a child I knew I was looking at a thing of beauty.
My mother-in-law’s (and my sister-in-law’s, and mine, and soon to be my daughter’s) wedding dress has 7 (something) blue rosettes and Bullock’s Pasadena embroidered on an inside seam.
How I long for the romance of the Los Angeles of Chandler* and my childhood.
The shopping.
The 5 South to Disneyland.
Sigh.
*Raymond, that is.
Here in Hawaii, Liberty House has been subsumed by Macy’s.
But we still have Ben Franklin!