One fast food place that has disappeared is Carrol’s. We used to have them in several places in New Jersey. They were comparable to a McDonald’s or Burger King.
The Good news is that, although Carrol’s-named drive-ins have disappeared, the company is still around. According to Wikipedia, the Carrol’s Restaurant Group is the largest franchisee of Burger King in the World, and also owns 55 Popeyes, and it had owned a lot of other fast-food places
In the 80s there was a chain of health food restaurants called Good Earth. Health good, unbelievably bland. Nothing had any flavor. But, if you were dating a retro hippie chick, you pretty much had to go there at least once a month. I still see their tea in supermarkets, but all the restaurants are gone in my neck of the woods.
TG&Y for my fishing lures and Zebco spincasting rods and reels
Western Auto, I can’t remember what I got there
Spiratone - mail order unique and oddball and often really low cost photographic equipment.
Dairy Queen - still exists but I haven’t been to one in about 30 years
Final bankruptcy and liquidation in late 2015 and 2016.
I lived in Westchester County (suburbs north of New York City) in the early 1990s and there were A&P supermarkets there but they were sad places. There was a Food Emporium supermarket (owned by A&P at the time) near me and that was nice. My point is that A&P ceased to be a relevant store decades before its final collapse.
There was also a vegetarian restaurant with that name in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, but I think that was just a coincidence. Dunno if it’s still there.
My favorite place to get ice cream as a kid was Isaly’s. They had their famous “Skyscraper” cones, made with a special scoop, bearing a resemblance to Marge Simpson’s hair. They had a lot more than just ice cream, but that’s all I ever went there for.
Our Shakey’s was never like this, but the description reminds me of Pizza & Pipes, another childhood favorite. I have an autographed photo from the organist at the Greenwood, Seattle location.
When I was a teenager I remember reading about an A&P in a Judy Blume book and thought it was some exotic place. The closest grocery store to us in our NJ apartment was an A&P and I would go there when I just needed a few things or if there was too much snow. As soon as we moved, I never went back. It was run down when we moved there, and never got any better.
H. Salt Esquire, perhaps?
Long John Silver’s?
Could it be Arthur Treacher’s?
Just wanted to apologize to pkbites and anyone else who misses Arlans. My friend Tom and I put them out of business.
Long, sordid tale… let’s just say it involved switching the plastic wrap on record albums (hey, the price tags themselves were too sticky). When I looked them up forty years later and saw they’d gone under long ago, my first reaction was a tiny pang of guilt.
You can still see those buildings all over southern Wisconsin. There’s one in Monona, WI that became a hipster euro-furniture store (didn’t those nouveau-riche-wannabes realize they were shopping in an old grocery store?).
The one on North Ave. in Wauwatosa (which had a mezzanine! We thought it was so cool to run up there and look down on all the shoppers) is now a Sendik’s.
For those unfamiliar, this is what a Kohl’s grocery store looked like:
While they were primarily a southern Wisconsin chain, we had two in Green Bay. The building on the east side of town is still there, if Google Street View is accurate, but the one on the west side was near Lambeau Field, and it was torn down when the Packers built the Titletown complex a few years ago.
Interesting! Near where I lived, in Queens, there was a Penn Fruit grocery in a very similar building. I wonder if it was a standard model for a while. This was in the late '50s and throughout the '60s. The grocery changed names several times during this period.
It was where I went to buy live lobsters and rode them back home in the basket of my bike.
Old Safeways had the same type building. There’s one that’s still a Safeway a mile or so from our house, just outside DC.
So is that Kohl’s supermarket chain related to the Kohl’s department store chain?
Here are a couple menus from Old Spaghetti industrial settings:
The Old Spaghetti Factory : VintageMenus
The Old Spaghetti Warehouse in Houston, TX (1977) : VintageMenus
By the time I moved to Milwaukee’s East Side in the late 90s, the local Bill Knapp’s was basically a flophouse for the homeless and mentally ill. A friend of mine came to visit and we got into the whiskey and, before long, everything good was closed. We wandered over to Bill Knapp’s and got it all: poor service, hostile interactions from those (k)napping there, super long wait despite no one else ordering anything. We got our sorry bags of food and left. About 20 seconds later, my buddy, who had obviously been stewing for a while, fired his bag down a gangway with full might in a fit of rage I hadn’t seen from him before or since.
I believe so. Some of the Kohl’s department stores had a Kohl’s food store right next door.
Here’s the one that became a furniture store. It felt odd to have a high-end store full of Ekornes and Eames chairs in an old grocery store…
I feel slightly resentful that Arthur Treacher’s went under and the inferior Long John Silver’s survived.