You must be an immigrant to Rochester. Kresge’s was the center anchor store for the North Hill Shopping Center and was built on a concrete slab. The original supermarket was a Wrigley’s next to Tienken Rd. and the south anchor was a Cunningham Drug Store. (They have extended the shopping center to the south into the sandlot baseball field, so I don’t know where to describe where the Cunningham’s used to be.)
On the other hand, in downtown Rochester, the D&C (no snickering: it stood for Dime & Cent and was a popular Southeast Michigan chain until the big boxes ran them all out of business), did have creaky wooden floors. It was on the northwest corner of Main St. and West Fourth.
And to end the speculation, Kmart is the successor chain to the S. S. Kresge Company (and it looks like Kmart is going to suppress their own name in favor of Sears since they bought Sears a couple of years ago). (And now I see that A.R. Cane has posted that, but I have a link.)
We have an actual “Dime Store” here in Kansas City. It’s currently being remodeled, but it has a little hardware, a little kitchenware, craft supplies, toys, snacks, and cards/wrapping paper. They’re still out there, although the stuff costs more than a dime, of course.
As late as the early 80s there was a Woolworth’s in Gainesville, FL that was definitely old school. I used to go there for lunch for their tuna melts. And they had a fabulous “notions” area.
I was just scrolling along waiting to post this. To pick a nit though, it was Sprouse Reitz. I know this because I spent many years trying to figure out how to say it. They had the best candy. And stickers.
These store were something of early models for today’s Targets and Kmarts.
Anybody remember Gemco from the 70’s? You “joined” the store for $1 and got a card and they had everything. Full grocery, pharm, clothes, toiletries, tools, electronics, tires, etc. When it closed, it became a Target store.
Back in the '70s, my aunt would take my sister and me downtown on the Saturday after Thanksgiving to see Santa Claus arrive at the big downtown department store (Watt & Shand). He’d come in a hook-and-ladder fire truck, then ride the bucket all the way up to the roof… from which point he would “slide down the chimney” to the toy department in the basement. (Even as a kid I figured he took the elevator down, but the fire truck bit was still fun to watch.) Afterwards she would take us to Woolworth’s and let us sit at the counter - Mom hated to sit at the counter so on the rare occasions we ate at the lunch counter there she’d insist we get a booth - and order pumpkin pie, with coffee for her and chocolate milk for us. It was a real treat.
Years later I figured out the point of the Woolworth’s stop was that she wanted a place to sit down and have a cigarette
We lived within walking distance of downtown, so we would often pop into Woolworth’s (a.k.a. “the five and ten”) for things like spare buttons or new shoelaces. There was a small pet department in the back of the store with gerbils and goldfish and such in conditions that would never be allowed today, but we thought it was a treat to be allowed to spend some time looking at them.
In the nineties the managemant bought out the German Woolworth (no 's for some reason) so we still have them. You can find a few current offers under “Aus unserer Werbung” and its subcategories.
We had both a Ben Franklin and a Woolworth at one point. One of them had a soda fountain/lunch counter. The really cool place, though, was owned by a local merchant by the name of Benny Leonard, and called Leonard’s Variety. The guy had tons of cheap crap piled throughout the store. He would hire kids like me to price his goods and pay us $.25 an hour. The bonus was that he kept bottled sodas cold in his toilet tank, and you could have all you wanted as long as you replaced the cold ones with warm ones. I remember walking past his place when I was a teen and seeing him standing outside with tears running down his face. I asked him what was wrong and he said he couldn’t compete with the bigger stores, so was closing his doors. A sad day.
I believe this is a misconception on your part. Big Lots and Odd Lots and the like do not sell damaged goods. They just sell, as their name implies, large lots of cheap wholesale goods… However, they are not damaged goods.
I’ll admit the possibilty you speak of, but the one time I went in our nearest Big Lots, all I saw were broken containers of things like Tide, Cheerios, vegetable oil, motor oil, and what seemed to be stuff they’d picked up off the side of the road or train tracks after a mishap. There appeared to be no rhyme nor reason to how things were arranged on the floor. Just random boxes/crates/containers of stuff damaged in shipment or whatever.
That may have been a special occasion, but since I didn’t find whatever it was that I thought I’d find there, and since it reminded me of the way relief packages are depicted on TV coverage of Live Aid and the like, I just haven’t been back.
Was this in Fort Worth, Texas? We had a Leonard’s store here, with cheap merchandise. It was a huge store, and a shopping trip there was an occasion. The parking lot was so big that it had trolleys going from various sections of the lot into the underground entrance of the store.
As for Big Lots, from what I see they carry things like last year’s makeup, overruns, and discontinued items. We have a store in town that DOES carry damaged goods. If you want outdated yogurt, hey, you can find it at that place. You can find all sorts of outdated food items. They have a constantly changing selection of products. If several bags of dry dog food are damaged in transit, this store buys them and dumps them into the huge bin of dog food, you scoop it out into a bag yourself. You might get Iams, you might get Field Trial in your scoops. I’ve seen a selection of candles that got too warm in the warehouse and melted together offered for sale. I guess people buy them for firestarters or something.
Yes, I am not a native to Rochester. I grew up in Flint, where Kresge was on Saginaw St, across from JC Penny and Baker Drug Store.
As far as North Hill Shopping Center, you would not recognize it today. Wrigley became Farmer Jack which became Food Emporium. Cunningham became Arbor which became Rite-Aid. The extension you reference held an ABC Appliance, which is now vacant. There is a new shopping center across Rochester Rd now that is anchored by Walgreens. Across Tienken, another new shopping center is going up with Papa Joe’s relocating there from further south on Rochester. Another Rite-aid is in there as well, so I expect there will be another vacancy in the North Hill plaza (if not already).
As for the K-Mart / Sears deal, there was an attempt by the post-merger Sears Holdings to makeover the K-Mart stores into Sears Essentials. They stopped this move & have kept some Sears Essentials and some K-Mart stores.
Our W.T. Grant was much smaller. Single story…maybe the size of two or three White Hen Pantries. Ours had a little pet department, cool jewelry, notions, and a great lunch counter (I never ordered enough to sit in a booth). Mmmm…vanilla cokes…
The local greasers would sit in the back booth and make out with their cheap-looking girlfriends (who undoubtedly wore white lipstick purchased at Grants). Cabrettas, pomps and shark-skin pants everywhere.
We had a Ben Franklin’s in the little town where I grew up, with creaky wood floors and all. It smelled like wood polish, dust and something else. I remember buying cheap toys, stationary, pencils and other little treasures. My grandmother took me to Woolworth’s and Walgreen’s, where I remember buying my mother a one-cup metal measuring cup, as my gift to her when I returned from my visit. I bet it cost a quarter–and she used it for years.
Another 5-and-dime I remember is Roses, which was bigger and more of a forerunner of Wal-Mart, before they got huge.
There was a G.C. Murphy still open as late as the late '80s in Kamm’s Corners in Cleveland. I bought my cheap 2-foot fake Christmas tree from them, and I may still have it arond somewhere!
And Rose’s still exists - there’s one in University Mall in Chapel Hill and there are others scattered throughout NC.
I got my red eared slider turtles in a Woolworths about 1966, along with little turtle bowl complete with plastic palm tree. They grew to ten inches, required an aquarium, and ate ground beef.
I swear that besides Woolworths there was a five and dime in Queens called Lampsons - but Googling comes up with nothing. There was abig Woolworths in Princeton NJ up to about 1990, when it finally closed down. Very traditional, complete with lunch counter and notions.
Five and dime lunch counters were great, since they gave kids experience with eating in a restaurant while being cheap and unthreatening. Sitting at the counter and actually ordering requires better behaviour than a fast food place.
And I’ll echo that dollar stores today are nothing at all like five and dimes.
