In Canada, the only fast-food restaurant in the small town I grew up in was a chain called Dixie Lee. I think they still might exist out in the Maritimes, but they left western Canada a long time ago.
Sears. Ok, Sears apparently still exists, but they’re pretty much on their death bed at this point. Our town was too small for a full Sears department store, but we had a Sears Catalog Store where they had a few items on the floor, but most things had to be ordered from the catalog in the store. And I think you could pick up your items there instead of having them shipped to your house, and I assume you didn’t have to pay the shipping fee that way. Kind of an early version of the “order online, pick up in store” option.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve shopped at Sears as an adult, and all those times were only because they had a good deal on an appliance I needed.
I worked at a Friendly’s too. Only for about 3 months before moving on.
Grand Union is gone but Foodtowns are still around. One is only about 6 miles from me.
Another mention for The Ground Round, and Shakey’s.
Radio Shack (where one of my college girlfriends worked for a time) and Circuit City (they were my client for a couple of years) have already been mentioned – a couple of other now-dead electronics chains: Silo (where I bought my first component stereo system), Highland, and Fretter.
Thinking about the stores in the mall where I spent my money in high school: Waldenbooks, Musicland, and Kay-Bee Toy & Hobby. All of them gone now.
I had a stereo from Silo too. Also a 5 disc CD changer in 1989. Wow, hi-tech gizmo.
Radio Shack I liked when they had components and competent clerks. Eventually they only had register people and 40 small drawers of a parts. Long before they went under I was sick of Radio Shack and selling crappy cellphone deals, RVs and batteries.
Yes I was a home Hobbyist that built and fixed electronics. Man I had a killer color organ. A good strobe light and when things failed on that Silo Sanyo Stereo, I fixed it.
Is Sam Goody still around, I spent a lot of time there, especially when I worked at a Friendly’s in the Mall.
Bankrupt in 2006, then bought by Trans World Entertainment, which owns FYE and Suncoast Video; they converted nearly all of the remaining Sam Goodys into FYEs, though there are apparently still two stores branded as Sam Goody (one in Ohio, one in Oregon).
Thanks @kenobi_65, oddly Suncoast is one of the few Mall Stores I still visit. I seem to love bargain bins.
It’s all part of the dumbing down of America. Why bother to build stuff or fix it when you can go to Wally World and buy what you want for a buck two eighty?
I have an ex-bf who lived in SR who said he had to watch out for the dogs out for their “tests.” Occasionally, the close-to-flunking-out dogs would pull the tester into traffic…or try. But my friend got all her dogs from Guide Dogs for the Blind. Great dogs.
I miss Wil Wright’s ice cream parlor. High school and college we went to the one in Westwood Village in the coolest outdoor patio. And the ice cream was awesome. Best butterscotch I’ve ever had. I liked the butterscotch sundae with the Dutch chocolate ice cream, and I got the deluxe version with whipped cream and whole almonds. My sister liked the marshmallow (yuck), and once she ordered one with vanilla ice cream and not deluxe. So it was just a scoop of vanilla covered with marshmallow sauce, and the guy who make it put one almond right in the center. The waitress was po’d, but we just laughed our butts off.
One of my high school friends’ older brother worked there, and he got stopped by the cops a lot because he was a “dirty hippy.” Once a cop stopped him on his way home and told him to empty his pockets. They were full of the lollipops and peppermint sticks from the Wil Wright’s. The cop actually got pissed at him. Oh, and the little macaroons in the little waxed paper envelope. Sigh.
There was a coffee shop called Tommy Nye’s across from the Helm’s Bakery on Venice Blvd. It was just an ordinary coffee shop, but they had a treasure chest full of cheap little plastic toys that kids got to pick from. I thought that was the coolest thing when I was about 5 or 6.
And there’s still a Shakey’s on Sepulveda and Jefferson. I just drove by it a week ago, and they are set up for outside “dining.” We always went to that particular Shakey’s after football games.
We used to have a big department store downtown, kitty-corner from the downtown F. W. Woolworth’s, called Meier & Frank. I remember if you went to the back of the store, they had elevators with operators. You asked to go to the tenth floor, where the toys were. They had a train around the ceiling, that children could get rides on in December. There was a customer service department on the 12th floor – the 11th floor was a mystery (I think it was full of executives and accountants).
The old Seattle REI store on Capitol Hill (the only brick & mortar for a long time, located next to where the street was recently painted with “black lives matter”) was awesome. I have no desire to to see the new one, because there is no way it could have that kind of character.
For a few years, we had an apartment about five blocks from Lloyd Center, one of the oldest shopping malls in the country. Unlike almost all the others, Lloyd Center was open to the sky. There were broad roofed walks in front of the stores, with open spaces between. The ice rink in the middle was mostly sheltered from the rain. It has since been modernized into a generic mall experience.
Then there was Rose’s deli, where the sandwiches were taller than your mouth and you could get a 75 cent donut that was a foot wide. Ten inches, at least.
No brand names per se make me nostalgic, but rather video game parlors of the 80s which didn’t have many national names. Other places were merely adjuncts to the fun that could be had for a few hours at an arcade. K Mart and Woolworths are only nostalgic because they sometimes had 1 or 2 games in their foyer!
It was slightly more fun when you had to go to a place and put your limited money into a machine to play because you knew you were there to have fun, as opposed to playing at your house, which in memory isn’t as fun because there are bad times that happen at your home too.
I’m pretty sure I’ve been in that store. Not often, Alexander’s was high on my family’s store list.
I’ve eaten there. I was introduced to Tad’s by the place they had at the NY World’s Fair.
Speaking of old NY restaurants, the birthday tradition for my brother and me was being taken to Paddy’s Clam House on 34th Street for lobster. Then they showed up on the list of restaurant closures for health reasons the Times used to publish. Which they stopped doing when they found that the restaurant inspectors would shake down the owners by threatening to get them in the Times list.
Stores:
Ben Franklin
Woolworth
Montgomery Ward (aka Monkey Ward)
L.S. Good’s
Stone and Thomas
Sears
Restaurants:
Burger Chef
Big Boy (drive-in)
I’ve eaten there many times. I hadn’t realized that they closed.
Someone who was a big fan, reportedly, was Kazuo Inamori, founder of Kyocera, the Japanese electronics firm that started as Kyoto Ceramics. He was studying American business, didn’t have much money at the time, and was amazed you could get a steak dinner for so little money.
Tad’s steaks could be kinda gristly, but they were worth the price.
Going in the other direction, stuff is increasingly difficult to repair. I was watching a Youtube video where a guy opened an old piece of audio equipment and each layer in had a label with instructions about how to get into the next part and what to replace. These days, you take your iPhone to the wrong fix-it shop and Apple will void your warranty and lock you out for unauthorized repair attempts.
Anyway, I also remember Ben Franklin and used to ride my bike there to squander my cash on novelty gag and magic trick items. Venture is where I’d go to hit up the toy department. When forced to go to the mall as a kid, I’d hole up in Waldenbooks until my mom finally came to get me. I remember Egghead Software but, before that it was a Babbage’s (same concept, don’t know if it was a buy-out or name change).
When I turned 16, I went on my birthday to Frank’s Nursery & Crafts where I got hired on the spot and started the next day. As the name implies, half of the store was craft merchandise and the other half (and outside yard) was lawn & garden products because, sure, why not.
I used to do component level repair on audio and video equipment. No more. Documentation such as schematics, parts lists, etc are nearly impossible to find these days. I don’t care how good your google-fu is, manufacturers simply don’t make that info available. Everything is designed for cheap manufacture, things are riveted or glued together, making it difficult or impossible to disassemble anything without breaking it. If you do manage to take something apart without destroying it, good luck in putting it back together.
There was the corner candy store/luncheonette that was a good source of cheap kites (i.e. the 25 cent kind* that broke or got hung up in a tree not long after you assembled it), Spaldeens, baseball cards and of course, candy.
*I think that was the deluxe plastic-covered model.
The Spaldeens were so common. 10 years after we left The City, we still had 2-3 Spaldeens left.
When I was small, My home town of Johnstown PA (Pop about 50K), had at least four department stores: Penn Traffic, Glosser Bros, Sears and Swanks. The latter was a must-visit at Christmas time to add to our ever-growing collection of American Flyer model trains. There was also a Woolworth and a couple of the 5/10 chains.
Supermarkets we patronized regularly were A & P and Acme. There were also a Ben Franklin and Western Auto within cycling distance from our house.
There were very few chain restaurants, mainly a Howard Johnson, McDonalds and an obscure Arby’s-like place called Rax.