This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asked about stores that we wish still existed.
Since I came in late, I can report on what everyone else named...
How could you not guess reviewers would put this first? Independent locally owned bookstores: Every middle-aged person probably knows at least one that closed because some dear older person or couple retired. Oh the days! Add mine to two other votes for bookstores as a general category.
Woolworth's: Sort of a smaller, older precursor to Wal-Mart, a discount department store where the young and underpaid used to look for most of the non-food items we bought. My Woolworth's memories include the ridiculous (the Tarr Shampoo Boy), the still vaguely embarrassing ("If they're not impressed by your resume yet, you'll just have to meet an employer the way they did in old movies. Wear your good school clothes, buy lunch and a newspaper at Woolworth's, and get to know the people who own all those offices!"), and the pure nostalgic delight: I still knit with my Woolworth's 9-pack plastic needles--some of them--and still wear, with pride, the first few sweaters I knitted with yarn from Woolworth's. Add mine to two votes for Woolworth's.
Record stores: To one vote for record stores as a general category, I'll add mine. Takoma Park's House of Musical Traditions sold records, sheet music, instruments, replacement parts, and accessories, and was a great place for anyone who liked music to spend as much time and money as possible. It still exists but it now specializes in instruments, not records. What students with only $5 to spend in any given week are missing!
Clothing stores: This is one type of store that should not be allowed to be eaten up by online stores. For some things, like T-shirts, mail-ordering a "small/medium/large" and finding out how it fits when it arrives may be good enough. For school, work, and party clothes, fit matters and people who buy off-the-rack clothes should insist on trying them on before they pay. Of course, store fitting rooms have always had bad lighting. People have assumed the colors would look better in natural light. That this assumption was often over-optimistic has traditionally fed the good charity stores where people sent their clothes for re-purchase by those whom they actually suited, heh-heh! Mail-order clothes ought in theory to feed even more clothes to charity stores but, hello, they're not feeding in good clothes, the kind one can be proud of saying one bought for two dollars in aid of the Prevention of Blindness Society. Too much of what people order online from Zara and Zulily and similar looks sleazy even before it's been washed and falls apart after. Add mine to one vote for clothing stores.
Malls: "One for all and all to the mall!" Children of two working parents used to be given some money and encouraged to hang out on shopping malls after school, before a parent came to meet them. It worked better for some kids than for others. Some teenagers were responsible enough to walk ten laps up and down the mall with friends, buy groceries for the family before Mom or Dad came to the mall, and save the money they had left for clothes, records, etc. Unfortunately several malls found that kids hanging out after school stole more than they bought. Meh. I never was a real fan of shopping malls, though I did meet the serious boyfriend while working a pushcart on an upscale mall; there was that. Two votes for malls.
Blockbuster: It seemed as if you could rent every movie in the known universe on videocassette at Blockbuster. I never actually rented a movie myself but I went to Blockbuster so many times with friends, friends' children, boyfriend, husband... Add mine to one vote for Blockbuster.
"Dollar theatre," a pre-TV concept where teenagers and/or local groups of people with special interests enjoyed semi-private chaperoned entertainment watching movies from bygone years for a dollar. (The Snarkout Boys, a two-volume series by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, was about teenagers who became friends through "sneaking out" to that sort of theatre.) We didn't really have one in any place where I ever lived; the closest thing was a church-subsidized Christian Cinema, free with offerings taken up at intermission, that operated in Kingsport for a few years. In Gate City, "Cotton" Roberts' "topless theatre" has been given a temporary roof and could easily be opened as a Dollar Theatre by any local movie buffs who want to revive, say, cowboy movies, or Disney Movies from the Walt & Roy Years, or silent movies, or, oh, any specialty that's popular enough to have its own Roku channel... Anyway, one vote for "dollar theatre."
Waldenbooks: Never as big as Barnes & Noble or Books a Million, but it used to be a nice chain. One vote for Waldenbooks.
Child World: I don't remember this but it sounds like a toy store. One vote for Child World.
Pay Saver: Apparently that was another discount department store. One vote for Pay Saver.
Netto: George Thomas describes this as a Danish-based store that apparently spread to the UK and offered good prices on groceries. One vote for Netto.
The Harmony Club: Described as a "hangout" operated hippie style, more for fun than profit. Few of those survived even the 1970s but oh, they were fun. One vote for the Harmony Club.
Bookstar: Described as a large local chain bookstore. One vote for Bookstar.
Wet'n'Wild: Described as a water park. One vote for Wet'n'Wild.
Odyssey Records: Described as a specific, local record store in Las Vegas. One vote for Odyssey Records.
I should add something. Nobody else has mentioned a wool shop. So many needlecrafters saved up to open a wool shop to run for ten or twenty years between official "retirement" from a job working for someone else and real retirement. Often the shop reopened as a different store, in the same location with some of the same inventory, several times and customers hardly even noticed. Inez's Stitchery in Kensington (often classified as part of Silver Spring but it's a separate place), Maryland, was unique and probably couldn't have been run by anyone else. There was a real Inez; she was awful, but she stocked good yarns and pattern books and she could teach beginners how to knit, sew, and crochet. Even if you didn't like Inez, personally--did anyone?--you'd work there as Christmas help for the discounts. It was a huge store, the top half of a whole building. It had something for everyone who had discovered it. It was publicized and patronized by Goldie Hawn, whom I met while Christmas-helping there. (She was just a hometown girl shopping in her old favorite store. She was, at the time, much prettier in real life than her characters in movies; still, there are a lot of good-looking women in Silver Spring, so it was the voice that made me stop and stare, "Is that REALLY...?") I think I've sold everything I made with yarn from Inez's but I still have some of the pattern books.
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