Our version of Service Merchandise was a store called Best. I think originally it was Best Products, but the idea was the same. My mother always made me stand at least two feet away from all the display counters. Why, I don’t know 
We shopped at the Piggly Wiggly, but the Gucci store was the Handy Andy across town. They had a wine section that looked like a basement, a bakery and even *live lobsters *in the store. You could pick your own! (Actually, I always thought that was sort of creepy.)
We had something here in St. Louis called Showcase Merchandise. I got my ears pierced at one on my 13th birthday. For St. Louis natives, I remember a location on Manchester in the Des Peres area, and another one in Clayton.
Incidentally, did anyone ever call this anything but Monkey Ward? (Well, we said “Monkey Ward’s”, because adding the possessive where it doesn’t belong was just the done thing. But I never heard anyone say the “Montgomery” part correctly, outside of the TV ads.)
When I was a wee flod our local department store was Watt&Shand. It was just barely a chain, with the anchor store downtown and another branch at the big local mall. We didn’t shop there often since most departments were a bit upscale for our budget, but I remember going to the candy department with my mother to buy bonbons, which my grandmother loved and which were difficult to find other places. I seem to remember the fabric and notions department was quite good, too, and that we got a lot of my father’s handkerchiefs and such from the men’s haberdashery. (Wonderful word, haberdashery.)
Most of all I remember going downtown on the Saturday after Thanksgiving to watch Santa arrive at Watt&Shand - he would come on the fire department’s hook-and-ladder truck, get hoisted up to the roof of the main building, and then “slide down the chimney” (or so we were told) to the toy department in the basement.
I know I’m yelling into the wind here, but cities lost some of their character when local stores like that were replaced by chains.
I remember Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo. (I guess the Kleinhans family had donated money to build it). When I was 15, I saw Leonard Bernstein there. Lukas Foss was the music director and he was sick and couldn’t make it, so Bernstein substituted. Holy crap-what a thrill! I was never into rock music, even as a teen, but seeing Leonard Bernstein was one of the high points of my life up to then.
When I was very little I called it “the boat store.” They used to sell small fishing boats and would display them outside the main entrance to their store, near where the auto service center was. Sometimes I still drive by where they used to be and think of them as the boat store.
I still remember one of their radio jingles:
Woodward’s
Dollar Forty-Nine Day
Tues-day
(whistling)
Without doubt, though, I would have to say Woolworth’s, especially Woolworth’s in the States. They always had a great toy department, a fantastic candy counter, and one could usually find stamps and coins for sale. The former were in the toy department, the latter usually in a binder near the checkouts. Whenever I visited my grandparents, one of the highlights was always driving over the bridge to International Falls and shopping at Woolworth’s.
When they left the downtown area for the mall on the edge of town, and then morphed into Woolco around 1978, the niche was filled by a Ben Franklin store, but it wasn’t nearly as good, although you could buy stamps there and hockey cards in season.
A lot of the ones mentioned already, and then some. There are some stores that closed when I was still little that I liked like Yankee Bargain, Kings, Zayres, and Globe, but the ones that I really miss are: Ames, Caldor, Bradlees, Rich’s (all four chains closed within a five year period! Pre-Walmart in most parts of the state, though), Circuit City and CompUSA, and all the book stores! The closest bookstore that sells new books (a Barnes and Noble) is now 20 miles from my house. They closed down two mall bookstores in February, and I don’t expect them to be replaced any more than the ones that closed a few years ago, Stroudwater books, were replaced 
There are still Ben Franklins around here, though.
Canada has a similar store called Consumers Distributing. There was no show room, though, only a bunch of catalogs.
Edit: Um, never mind. I missed Sunspace’s post.
Edit 2: Actually, it appears I missed a whole page of the thread.
I used to shop at W T Grant’s back in the 60’s and early 70’s. Used to buy those big, wide leather belts w. big buckles. They don’t make 'em anymore. W T Grant was laid back, easy shopping, not the frantic rat-race at today’s big-box stores.
AJH47
I see this is a zombie thread, but I miss the K-marts of my youth. They had kiosks with submarine sandwiches, shaved ham by the pound, huge bags of popcorn for a quarter, and frozen Cokes. They had K-mart brand everything- tires, motor oil, televisions, shoes, paper plates, you name it, they had a K-mart brand of it. I recall buying a TV, portable AM/FM radio, and car stereo stuff there. I still use a K-mart brand car battery charger I bought there around 1978.
K-marts are now mere wimpy ghosts of what they once were.
I was working for Zayre when they closed down. It was one of my first teen jobs. Their main problem was employee theft, and boy there was a LOT of it. Everyone who worked there walked out with whatever they damn well wanted, myself included. Not at first, of course, but when you see that everyone’s doing it, you think it must be a perk of the job. My best friend worked in the jewelry department so holidays were nice.
Now that was 24 years ago and I know better now. I haven’t stolen anything since, and didn’t even recognize it as stealing then. Anyway, that’s the store I miss the most.
And Woolworth, where I got my first '45 record. Joan Jett’s I Love Rock and Roll.
I agree completely with the first part of this. Department stores now lack entire departments that used to be there, and don’t have the same feel as the old stores, especially the old, major, cdenter-city stores.
I miss Korvette’s in central NJ, too. One thing I loved about that store as a kid was that they had a huge wraparound display window inside the store where they took out examples of each of the toys and set them up so you could see what they looked like in use. I’ve never seen that anywhere else.
Sibley, Lindsey, and Curr in Rochester (later just Sibley’s, and now gone) had a gorgeous downtown store with bonsai-like trees over each display window and an incredible dining room at their downtown store. Jordan Marsh in Boston had a beaten metal exterior (that preservationists later fought a desperate battle to preserve, whuich they lost) and was famous for their blueberry muffins (I’m told that there’s one family that retained the rights to this, and you can still get them, but you have to go to Maine to get them). They also had an excellent Coin and Stamp department.
I miss the great collection of narrow-focus LDS culture and history books at ZCMI in Salt Lake City (and the way they made sure that all their books were “correlated”, although one Mormon woman I dated assured me that there was plenty of soft-core porn in the Romance section).
I miss
Two Guys
J.J, Newberry’s
McCurdy’s
Bambergers
Alexanders
Montgomery Wards
Woolco
Woolworth
S.S. Kersge (K-Mart ain’t the same)
Modell’s Shopper’s World, an attempt to out-Two Guys the Two Guys. Modell’s is still around, as a sporting goods only store
Ben Franklin’s – I’m told it’s still around, as a gift and art-supply store. But in my childhood it was a 5 & 10 on Main Street that sold everything. There were one or two others in the state, but the website tells me they’re gone from NJ.
There were actualy two small “department stores” on main street in my hometown, hard as that is to believe today. They would be dwarfed by the Target near where i now live, but they siupplied the needs of my town – and were within walking distance of everyone’s house, back when most people either had no car or couldn’t drive (my aunts included).
Webb’s City in St. Petersburg, FLA.
It had live Mermaid’s and a piano playing chicken!
Along with an excellent cafeteria.
I wonder how many stores the internet has killed or will kill?
Abraham and Straus in Brooklyn, NY. Fantastic Lobby area with manned elevators. The highlight of our Christmas was going to see the fantabulous upside down tree hanging from the lobby and visiting Santa’s Workshop on the 8th Floor. They had a custard stand in the basement, a hot dog cafe on the street floor and a full service restaurant, “The Garden Room” on the fourth floor.
Woodward and Lothrop’s. They had a restaurant that served me the best meal I’ve ever had (in a restaurant). The merchandise was good, too.
Younkers’ 7th & Walnut store, Des Moines, 1899-2005.
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if people don’t wanna come downtown, nobody’s gonna stop 'em.
Western Auto. Pretty much dead and gone now, but I used to be able to find all kinds of interesting things to buy in their stores.
The Orange Belt Emporium in downtown Pomona, California. It was the first place I ever rode an elevator, with an elevator operator. And a mezzanine. And every time you made a purchase, the saleswoman sent it from her department to the cashier via pneumatic tube, and the cashier would send back your receipt. It was a brave new world in the late 50’s.
I see after all these years, nobody mentioned Swezey’s Departmentstore, which was I believe only a Long Island chain of about five stores at it’s max - guess it’s no surprize, as the last store closed 7 years (2003) before this thread was begun. I had only visited the Glen Cove store, it was OK
It also just occured to me (after re-reading this thread) that so many stores have closed, many malls no longer have a full complement of “Anchor” Department stores - the former department store space being brought up by former rivals and used as outlet stores, outdoor stores, and the like - for example, on Long Island NY, Green Acres comes to mind, the former Sterns became a Macy’s men’s clothing outlet, and was eventually subdivided into that and a Kohl’s. Roosevelt Field was the same way, the former Sterns (I think) became a sporting goods store (now Dicks) and a furniture outlet. (The Source Mall was really hit hard, losing first it’s Circuit City, and then Fortunoff’s which was the whole reason for the Mall in the first place - unfortunately for them, these establishments remain empty after several years)