Reasonable breakdown. The only thing I would add is that in the day when Kress, Elmore, Woolworth and others of that ilk were the alternatives to department stores, (and this was in the day before the highly specialized stores we have in abundance these days), the “dime store” would be in the smaller towns, even if there were some of the same stores in the bigger towns and cities. They just seemed to have a shopper loyalty even when the department stores may have offered a bigger variety or more “quality” merchandise.
As my memory goes, the sequence went from dime store, through “discount store” to Wal-Mart in stages of more and more foreign goods and less and less knowledgeable workstaff, and brighter lights and bare bones shelving. The warmth of the old dime store was the first thing to go.
Stickers. You know, little paper pictures with adhesive on the back that little girls like to collect and put in sticker albums or trade with their friends? Often of unicorns or similar glurge. Smelly stickers have little scent capsules on them, so when you scratch them with a fingernail, they smell. Puffy stickers are sort of three dimensional plastic things. I have no idea how they’re made, come to think of it.
This is going to qualify for what I learned today! I had no idea. The closest I can remember to these may have been those tattoos that washed off. That or those Valentine hearts candies with all the little slogans on them.
There’s a chain of computer printer ink cartridge stores opening locations all over the place around here.
In Buffalo, there is (was?) a retail chain that sold nothing but windshield wipers.
Before there were big Christian bookstores, there were smaller religious supply stores. I still see a lot of them around here, mostly catering to Catholics. They seem to have an old-school five-and-dime flavor. I owuld imagine that outside of cities with large Catholic populations, small religious supply stores are a dying breed.
I’ve shopped there. It’s a functional, old-school five-and-dime store; it’s not intended to be a tourist attraction, but it draws them in because of its uniqueness. It’s the real thing; the products, the smell, the wooden floors.
Good deal. The post about religious bookstores reminds me that even though Nashville has several large-scale religious bookstores, including a Baptist and a Methodist outlet for their publishing houses, my wife was unable to locate a New Testament in any of them! I suppose there will eventually be a demand – small perhaps – for the New Testament Store.
This reminds me of the joke about the gal that went into the Catholic bookstore to buy a cross pendant, and after the clerk showed her several she asked, “Do you have any with the little man on them?”
The soda fountains were definitely in drug stores. I remember department stores having a cafeteria/restaurant as an expected thing. My grandmother and I used to enjoy shopping together, and then we’d stop to recharge and plan our next attack in one of those little spots. The food wasn’t great, but it was pretty good, and we enjoyed it. Nowadays, of course, the malls have food courts, which are simply not the same.
We used to have Mott’s Five and Dimes stores in Fort Worth, even though we had many department stores as well. Mott’s carried lesser toys, some basic clothes, baby items, basic hardware (screws, nails, basic tools), candy (both “penny” candy loose in bins and wrapped candy bars), fabric, sewing notions, yarn, pattern books, embroidery patterns and floss, cosmetics…back when I was a kid, they carried some animals, such as rodents, birds (mostly budgies and finches, and the teeny tiny turtles that were popular and legal back then. There was a Mott’s in the strip mall where my mother got her hair done, and I was allowed to go browse the merchandise there, as long as I didn’t cause any trouble.
Our local Woolworth’s went out of business when I was a kid. Before it did, my grandfather insisted on taking me to the lunch counter to get a sandwich and soda. I remember him saying in a wistful tone that there weren’t going to be any more dime store lunch counters soon, but as a kid I didn’t think it such a loss. Now, I’m glad I had the experience.
All of the dime stores in this area are gone now, and most of the independant shops are dying.
In my childhood in the 1970s, I remember big dime stores; not small-town Woolworth’s-type places, but multi-story W.T. Grant stores.
Wal-Mart-type discount department stores were around, but there were far more regional chains. I remember King’s, Two Guys, Twin Fair, Gold Circle, GEX, and later Ames and Hills. All of them were interchangeable; bare-bones fluorescent lighting and store fixtures, crusty floors, white drop-down ceilings, and the smell of burnt popcorn and hot dogs. For some reason, a lot of them had their origins in New Jersey.
A related question: are there any catalog stores still around? You remember: Best, Service Merchandise, Dahlkemper’s, Century House, Brand Names, and the like, where you buy something by submitting a form to a clerk, who sends it into a back room - five to ten minutes pater, your items roll off a conveyor belt and your name is called on a loudspeaker. The catalog store concept always seemed kind of Soviet to me, and I never understood the appeal.
Good point about the snack bars. Best I can recall, at least some of the Woolworth stores in their final years (80’s? 90’s?) had decent snack areas. In fact, I can recall at least one occasion when we arranged to meet some friends for a meal there. I forget whether it was the burgers, the onion rings, the shakes or maybe the pies that were so special, but it was at least as popular and as good as a Shoney’s to eat.
And the pets thing reminds me that Kress or Woolworth had a section for small pets like turtles, fish and birds. No dogs or cats or exotics, though. Those little turtles! What a memory. Maybe they had hamsters, too. That section of the store had a unique aroma.
I was reflecting on this, having grown up in the forties, and I recall these stores advertising themselves as “Five and ten cent stores”. People commonly called them “The five and ten”, or “The five and dime”. Later it was reduced to “The dime store”, perhaps inflation had an effect on deleting the nickel from the name.
The Service Merchandise form procedure broke me from shopping there. In fact, I went in for some blank recording tapes or something equally innocuous and cheap. When the guy basically refused to sell them to me without my supplying my phone number, I just left and never went back. Sad to say, I worked in the Service Mdse computer center for several months before running into similar hassle there.
Sam’s Club strikes me as the same level of pretentious these days. I don’t shop there either.
I concur. As often as not we’d refer to the store by name, like Elmore’s or Kress’s, but if somebody meant to refer to the store generically, it would be “five and dime” mostly.
For that matter, can you even find “penny candy” anymore? Do you even bend over to pick up a dropped penny these days?
I remember Kresge and Woolco (that turned into a Wal-Mart here in Victoria). There may have been Woolworth’s, but I’m not sure. The Kresge was a great, shabby, crowded place, and a great way to blow an allowance. There was a lunch counter with aqua plastic and steel stools. It felt very old-fashioned, even when I was a kid. Those kind of stores, I guess were “dime stores”, and carried almost everything a nice department store did (except large appliances and furniture) but cheaper stuff. My mother was an avid and extravagent shopper, and she made a sharp distinction between “nice” stores like Woodward’s, Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Kresge, K-Mart, Woolworth’s, but certainly shopped at both.
The dollar stores don’t feel like a dime store to me; they’re too small, all seem to be individual, and you certainly can’t get a cheeseburger and chocolate malt if you’re good and don’t whine too much while your mother buys everything from face clothes to underwear to buttons to school supplies. A dollar store is just another smallish store in a mall or strip mall, whereas a dime store could take a couple of hours to shop through (if you were my mother). They had a unique smell, too, from the combination of stuff being sold and the lunch counter grease.
There is still, I think, a store in my home town, that’s like a dime store. It’s a department store, and sells everything from winter coats to hardware to wool to wedding dresses. That’s the closest I can get to a dime store these days, and I don’t live there any more.
Now I want to listen to Nancy Griffith singing “Love at the Five and Dime” – the live version where she talks about running off the bus and into the five-and-dime…
(And I pick up pennies. It’s bad luck not to. It’s taunting fate. If you feel that you don’t “need” that cent, the fates will show you what it’s like to *really *need every penny…)
When I was a kid (in the 70’s & early 80’s), we journeyed from Austin several times a year to visit my grandparents in a very small town a few hours away. All my cousins would be there as well and it was a ritual for all of us kids at some point to walk down the hill from my grandparents’ house into town to go to the Winn’s five-and-dime. On the way, we’d stop at the railroad tracks and carefully place some pennies (I know–you’re not supposed to do this). Pa (my grandad) would have given us each a dollar, and I’d buy some candy (usually candy cigarettes or some Fun-Dip or a bag of lemon drops) and a toy (my favorites were balsa-wood airplanes, Silly Putty, or a Slinky). Then we’d trek back to the house, stopping on the way back to look for our flattened pennies in the rocks by the railroad tracks. I’d spend the rest of the afternoon throwing and chasing the balsa airplane, or building “stairs” out of books and boxes for the Slinky to walk down, or lifting pictures off a newspaper with the silly putty and stretching them into comical distortions.
Here in Yuma, we had a Kress, a W.T. Grant, and a coule of others whose names I can’t recall–all gone now. Oddly, Yuma never had a Woolworth’s, though the smaller town of El Centro, California–60 miles west–had one.
Hey, girls weren’t the only ones that bought stickers. I used to love buying the scratch 'n sniff ones. I didn’t quite collect them – I collected scented erasers.
I was a bit of a weird kid.
The “dime store” type stores I recall definitely weren’t much like normal department stores. Bargain Harold’s for example tended to have the main floor area littered with bins. There weren’t many shelves to speak of, just aluminum dump bins wherein clothing and other items were to be found when they weren’t hanging on the few clothing racks they had. What few shelves there were tended to be along the perimeter walls and were for displaying things like jackets and coats or larger toys and such. The front counter is where you’d find display racks full of stickers, packs of scented erasers, boxes of pop culture buttons (remember wearing buttons of your favourite bands?) and trading cards, candy, and other such impulse buys. There were also a few enclosed display cases where cheap electronics (calculators, watches, etc.) and costume jewelery could be found.
Bi-Way was similar, but with more clothing racks and a bit more emphasis on cosmetics and personal care.
Kresge I don’t remember well – they disappeared pretty early on in my life. I remember Woolco a bit better. It was like a department-store-sized Bargain Harold’s with its own restaurant (that, I might add, served excellent strawberry shortcake!)
