As a kid, we were taken downtown to the big dept. store to do Christmas shopping.
It was quite interesting … for maybe 15 minutes. See a few displays, check to see if they had anything different at the toy counter (they didn’t), marvel at the glass door elevators with the human operators.
But these trips lasted far, far longer. They were mostly incredibly boring.
Two others. When I was little we would go to a stand-alone Sears store that had a candy counter. They had the best chocolate covered malt balls.
And then there was Rike’s, with their flagship store in Dayton, Ohio. They had a bake shop where we would buy cream horns to eat over the kitchen sink. Even then, the powdered sugar went everywhere. The only one I’ve had since then which was better was a Schaumrolle in Salzburg. The bakeries sell something here which looks similar, but so disappointing.
Many of my childhood dresses and coats came from Rike’s as my grandmother loved to buy me stuff.
When I was about 7 I got to go to Seattle with my mother and her friend. We went to the Frederick and Nelson store. That was the high end store in Seattle back in the early 60’s. We didn’t have anything like that in Tacoma. I remember all the fancy decorations and the scale train that ran on tracks elevated above the toy department. Even the kids my age were dressed in suits and dresses, I wore jeans and tennis shoes. Chickened out on sitting on Santa’s lap, I can’t remember why. Ate lunch in the cafeteria, I was disappointed we sat in a booth instead of the counter. A few years later a new mall was built in Tacoma and it included a F&N store. It wasn’t the same as the one in Seattle.