Sears (department store)
Montgomery Wards (department store) usually referred to as “Monkey Wards”
Ben Franklin’s (5 and dime)
Woolworth’s (department store)
Ace Hardware (hardware, obviously)
Rite Aid (pharmacy)
A&P (grocery)
Restaurant Chains:
Burger Chef
Long John Silver’s
Ponderosa (steak house)
Dairy Queen
A few others, which fellow posters have reminded me of:
972 - second largest city in Redwood County.
We had two hardware stores - Gamble’s and Hardware Hank, 2.5 grocery stores (Super Value, Fairway and a very small independent that also had a clothing department (mostly work clothes), a Rexall Drug and a locally owned bank. And then a smattering of small businesses on the main street (not Main Street), including at least two places to eat.
Now there is just the Super Value, and the local bank was bought by another local bank in the next town over, and I think is still local to the area. There are also two bars which serve food.
I grew up in Queens in the '50s and '60s and we didn’t have a McDonalds. The first one I saw was in Boston in about 1970.
We did have
Woolworths
Lamstons (like Woolworths)
Radio Shack
A&P
White Castle
Chicken Delight (don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight)
Macys, Bloomingdales.
I grew up in a small town. The only franchises were gas station (Mobil and Flying A), grocery stores (Bohacks) and one of the banks (North Fork Bank andTrust).
Today, it’s got a Mobil, Gulf Oil, and a 7-11. There are also a couple of banks: Bank of America, Capital One, and Dime. The Grocery is an IGA, thought that’s technically not a chain.
I grew up in Milpitas California. When I was a child there was one tiny commercial street, called Main Street. No chains, I can still name all five or six concerns, which included a cafe, a general store, and a bar, and my dad’s newspaper office. It has 76,000 people now, so it probably has all the franchises available in the Bay Area.
We had a Woolworths (including lunch counter), a Sears Catalog store (mostly used for picking up orders.). Had an A&P, a Radio Shack
For “fast food”, we had a Dairy Queen, and Dog 'N Suds. Best damned rootbeer. Period. One of the very few still operating.
albertsons
smiths
safeway
a&w
kfc
mcdonalds
burger king
dairy queen
denny’s
checkers auto parts
(paul’s) IGA
7-11
stinker gas station
buttery’s (groceries)
skaggs (general store type, not quite a department store ala walmart but almost)
rite aid
rexall
m&w groceries
circle k (gas and convenience)
pizza hut
blimpies (sandwiches)
banking was all local state banks until (some time in the 80s or 90s?) some sort of regulatory change happened I think.
chevron
exxon
philips 66
shell
76 gas stations
Hilton Hotel (sold to Red Lion, Hilton has recently returned to Boise)
Kmart and Sears
JCPenny
radio shack
Taco Johns
couple of (someone’s)Big Boy
shakeys pizza
roundtable pizza
texaco
sambos
truvalue hardware
grover’s paynpac hardware
Grand Central dept store(owned by Fred Meyers and long closed)
shopko
taco bell
Winchell’s Donuts
several of these have either gone out of business completely or closed shop around here
Topps Fried Chicken
GC Murphy’s 5 and 10
Burger Chef
People’s Drug Store.
From Ufreida - sorry, I forgot to respond until too late.
I grew up in Milpitas California. When I was a child there was one tiny commercial street, called Main Street. No chains, I can still name all five or six concerns, which included a cafe, a general store, and a bar, and my dad’s newspaper office. It has 76,000 people now, so it probably has all the franchises available in the Bay Area
I live close to there. It contains a giant mall in the old Ford plant. I don’t go much since the Marie Callendar’s closed apparently without advanced warning to the employees. But it has all the stuff, and also some off 880.
I completely forgot one chain that was in my home town before I was . I see several people have mentioned it, as well. We had a Dairy Queen. Not downtown, but down by the town border, on the river. The shop is still there, despite many changes in ownership and several floodings. It hasn’t been a Dairy Queen in decades, but they still sell ice cream, but now it’s home made.
On the other side of town, but across the town lone so it was in the next town, was a Carvel’s. It’s still there, too, but hasn’t been a Carvel’s in decades, still pumping out independent ice cream.
Shainberg’s
Otasco
Western Auto
TG&Y
Bonanza (my first indoor job)
Dog n Suds (precursor to A&W->Sonic, I think)
Minute Man
Big Boy (Shoney’s)
Rexall
Walmart
Gibsons
Woolworth’s
Lion Oil gas stations
DX gas stations
Esso
I’m sure more will come to mind later.
Dog 'n Suds and A&W started around the same time (I think). Both got a boost in the 70s with the “Happy Days” 50s revival; I think A&W did better with that, although I haven’t seen one in a long time.
Hmmm. Looks like we’re both wrong. From Wikipedia:
Dog n Suds,
So A&W is the original, with Dog n Suds and Sonic having contemporary starts. Ignorance fought.
Founded not long after A&W was Stewart’s, which served hot dogs, fries, and mugs of root beer from bright orange stands. They were founded in 1924, and brought the food out to your car on a tray that mounted on your car window.
No roller-skating carhops, because the parking lot was, more often than not, simply sand and stones or maybe gravel. Skaters would’ve come to an undignified sudden skidding stop. I never even heard of such skating waitresses until American Graffiti came out.
The mugs were glass, not cheap paper cups. But they were deceptive – being heavy, with a hollow bottom, they gave you the impression of getting more root beer than you really did.
We didn’t have one in our town, but the next town over did.
Grew up in the burbs. In PA our town was a real bedroom community, not much there back then, a 7-11 and a Grand Union grocery store were the only chains I remember when we first moved there, and later a McCrory’s store, similar to K-Mart (later replaced by other stores of that type). There are a couple of more chains there now, a couple of grocery stores, a couple of chain restaurants, nothing else I can recall. But it was the burbs, just about every chain was close by in neighboring towns that were larger and had larger retail zones available.
My hometown didn’t allow franchise restaurants, so the only one we had (outside the town limits) was KFC. I didn’t eat at Taco Bell until I was in college. (The bigger nearby town had all the usual fast-food places but my mom didn’t like Taco Bell so we never went there).
We did have a few other chain businesses, but not many. The ones I can remember from my childhood/teens were:
Rexall Drug
Safeway
TG&Y (variety store)
Coast to Coast Hardware
Arco Gas
Carrow’s (I think they got a bit more lenient by then)
Western Auto
Radio Shack (my dad’s best friend owned it, which was why we had a TRS-80 in 1977ish).
Circle K
Ben Franklin (but I was in college by then)
I think my hometown had a Taco Bell downtown for like half a year. It occupied one of those “caboose diners” that had just folded. But franchise luck apparently didn’t hold because it too folded pretty soon.
I thought I remembered the Chicken Delight name from upthread, but this old jingle clinches it. But I have a propensity for remembering old jingles. One on TV when I was a kid was for Coast Federal Savings in downtown (9th and Hill on the ground floor), and I can still sing the jingle. There was a trained rabbit putting coins into a bank in the shape of the actual bank building. I was so excited when I found an old model bank with a rabbit figure on it on ebay a while back.
But I grew up in one of those small towns (30k pop at the time) that was surrounded by Los Angeles. We had tons of chains. The first McDonald’s I remember was on Sepulveda, and it was built in 1971. We had Winchell’s and a Ship’s Coffee Shop ( a chain much remembered – Shipshape burger anyone?), Curry’s Ice Cream, and more.
Hey, I drove thru there a couple of times in the 80s. Were you that guy on the corner wearing jeans and a tee shirt? Thought you seemed familiar.
Never lived in anything like a town growing up. Usually, the closest village was a half dozen run down houses, a bar, gas station and a church.
Ha, my actual town I grew up was 76 people; Belle Fourche was just the closest town with “things” in it (and where I went to school).