Yes! That’s exactly what came to mind when I was thinking about a restaurant.
They had fun ice cream dishes, with cool names like “The Pig’s Trough” and “The Zoo” that were progressively more insane.
If you could finish The Pig’s Trough you got to autograph the wooden tray it came in and you had to say some silly ditty and they gave you a pin.
They had a soda called a “Green River” that I liked.
Oh well.
Tragedy struck a Farrell’s some years back when a F86 Sabre crashed into it, killing and injuring many. That is absolutely the last thing you would expect when you are taking your family out for ice cream.
Years ago after an F14 crashed into a motel after the pilot ejected some comedian had a bit about that.
“News reports say some people were surprised… ‘some’ people? [Southern accent] You know, Ethyl, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if an F14 Tomcat came crashing through that wall right about now!”
I am surprised by how many people remember Service Merchandise, and fondly too. I shopped there several times and generally didn’t enjoy the experience. The items on display were a subset of what they sold, so it was hard to figure out if an item was really suitable for I was looking for. Then the weird checkout process. Sure, one could save money but I always questioned if it was worth my time.
There were several other catalog or similar chains around at the time. I think one had a name like “Lehrmans” and the other I forget completely. The latter one had a huge 2 story floor store with a ramp for shopping carts. It later became a “trade show” place. Lots of gun shows and such.
I never lived near enough to Best Products to shop there but I remember seeing a magazine article about the unusual architecture of its showrooms. This site has some photos showing some examples. Things like a brick facade that appeared to be peeling off, or a brick wall that appeared to be collapsing.
Back in the late 70s one of my first jobs was working IT at a wholesaler that supplied goods to a bunch of general merchandise retailers akin to Woolworth’s, etc. We didn’t sell every sort of good they needed to stock a store, but maybe an aisle or two.
One of our optional services was printing and applying price tags to their shipments at our warehouse, so the staff at the store could simply put the merch out for sale. That process also centralized tagging so unscrupulous store workers couldn’t reprice a bunch of [whatever] for cheap and then send their friends out to buy that stuff.
Anyhow, many, many retailers had a secret 10-substitution cipher for the retail price. That was printed right on the price tag. These were ordinary retailers, the CVSs, Walgreens, and Targets of their day. Very much not commission sales.
I’ll be damned if I understood why store HQs wanted that done. The cash registers of the day could not accept letter input, so it wasn’t even about capturing the true cost of goods sold as they leave the store.
But boy, did we print a lot of price tags per shift. Multiple boxes of ~8.5x11 fanfold paper w all those self-adhesive labels. Day after day, two shifts a day. It really sucked to be the poor warehouse workers who had to stick those on each item as it went into our shipping box destined for ABC Company’s Store #123.
It was fun to walk through stores that bought from us and a) know how to read the tags, and b) know that my software was printing them every day. They used the code of all their merch, not just the stuff we sold them. So I could wander around a Target-equivalent store and know what everything cost (!). Such insider power for a young kid! Some markups were really huge; others not so much.
It’s quaint now to think about what pre-priced merchandise says about store HQ management’s perception of price stability. As opposed to today where prices can change hourly.
This one was designed to look like two flat boxes, like shirt boxes, stacked on top of each other, slightly askew. They even duplicated things like the loading dock and back entrance, so you saw a blanked-off doorway on the second story just above where the real one was.
Best closed their doors decades ago. Whenever I pass by I wonder if the employees of the current owner know why the second floor is wonky like that.
That one is infinitely cooler than our “stacked boxes” store. At least you knew something was done intentionally with that one; ours was more of a “Huh? That’s odd looking” kind of thing.
Incidentally, Fry’s did have a Service Merchandise-like aspect. For some of the expensive-but-small items like CPUs and RAM, you picked out what you wanted on a wall, then found an employee who would write up the request (not hard since they earned commission). You’d take the printout to the checkout, where they would enter The Cage, which contained all such expensive items. They brought them back after a few minutes, you’d pay, and then walk out (after being harassed by a guy at the exit).
Annoying, but the employees weren’t always entirely useless. Sometimes you’d ask “I need two 4 gig sticks of PC1600 RAM, whatever’s cheapest”, and they’d tell you the PC2100 is on sale for the same price as the cheapest PC1600, and you’d get that instead. They mostly knew what was what.
I recall the mall a few blocks from my house had a Woolworth’s with a lunch counter that looked straight out of the '50s, shiny chrome and all, probably because the mall opened in 1955 and I would bet the Woolworth’s was one of the original shops. That Woolworth’s didn’t last many years after I moved to town. So we’re talking late '70s Chicago area, as my family moved into the suburb in question in 1977.
The Walgreens in the same mall also had a lunch counter (Wags?) that didn’t last too long, though the store itself was there for a decade or so before the mall did another extreme makeover. It was across from Madigan’s, a store that as a pre-teen boy always impressed me more with its architecture than its merchandise.
I visited the Fry’s Electronics stores in Santa Clara and Palo Alto a few times. The weird thing was that sometimes customers were more knowledgeable about a product than the store employees; sometimes they were the engineer who designed that product.
I loved Soup Plantation when I was in San Diego and on my visit back, made sure I went to it. Then I discovered Sweet Tomatoes was the same chain and when I went to Florida, I would visit the Orlando or Tampa one most of the times.
I was hoping we would get one in my area of Jersey, but instead COVID finished off the entire chain.
Sears was my first thought. I miss the prebuyout Sears. It was my favorite store.
Woolworth was a great store. I loved the one in Red Bank, NJ and ate at the lunch counter a few times as a kid. I miss old school 5 & 10s. The modern “dollar” stores are just not the same or as nice. Woolworth’s was the best of them.
I never loved Crazy Eddie’s but I do miss Tops. The store was a hard-sell store but their prices were very good and the selection was huge. I bought a fair amount of electronics there.
When I was 10, my parents (along with my aunt and uncle) bought a True Value hardware store. The store got weekly shipments of new and restocked merchandise from Cotter & Company (the True Value parent company / distributor), along with a bit stack of those labels on that fanfold paper.
Part of getting new merchandise ready to go out on the shelves was unpacking each item, finding its price tags on the fanfold sheets, and individually applying a price tag to each item. It was typically done by store staff (one of the clerks, and/or, often, my mom or my aunt), but on weekends, and during the summer, the parents often recruited us kids to help out with that.
Long, fiddly, boring work.
Even worse was when price changes came through from Cotter & Company (typically when the replacement cost of an item went up). It meant going through the sheets of paper with the new prices, finding each item on the shelves, peeling off the old sticker, and putting a new price tag onto the item with a “price gun.” It was an annoying task, which I often wound up doing as a teenager, working the store in the evenings, when there weren’t many customers.
As a kid, I used to ride my bike to W.T. Grants all the time—back when it was the fifth-largest retailer in the country. It was great for knick-knacks and whatnot, spending my allowance like it was burning a hole in my pocket.
They had a tiny pet department tucked away in the back, selling little critters and supplies. One day, I spotted a hamster running loose, zipping up and down the aisles like it was training for the rodent Olympics. I managed to scoop the little fuzzball up and handed him off to a sales clerk. I felt like a real hero that day!
It almost made up for the time the year before when I… uh… accidentally walked out with a hamster in my pocket. Let’s call that “unauthorized adoption.”
But then, things got weird. A rumor started circulating—about a pervert lurking in the changing room, grabbing young boys and, well… let’s just say it involved a sharp object and a very personal kind of loss. Looking back, it was probably just baseless playground gossip, but at the time? It was enough to keep me from setting foot in Grants for a while. I mean, losing my manhood at Grants wasn’t exactly how I wanted to go out.
That reminded me of those mall pet stores that had a wall of small cages, each holding a puppy for adoption. I remember once standing in front of the glass wall to that section, watching one clever pup who was working out how to unlatch the cage he was in. I was silently cheering him on.
That reminds me of the huge monkey cage inside the Cherry Hill Mall (opened 1961) in Cherry Hill, NJ. I used to root for the monkeys to escape… and apparently, they did on a couple occasions, tossing things at shoppers, biting, and causing general mayhem.
The mall also had a huge bird cage, but that wasn’t as much fun.
… I misremembered: it was the nearby Moorsetown Mall (opened 1963) that had the monkey cage.
(fine, I wrote some of the software on the driver CD).