When I was my daughter’s age, the stores near me included W.T. Grant (where I got my first credit card), Lit Brothers (where I worked two Christmas seasons), John Wanamaker (where my father worked in TV repair before I was conceived), A&P, and Sears (where I worked for seven years during and after college). They are all about to have one other thing in common.
Remember Montgomery Ward?
Sounds like you are from the Philly area....
In Central Indiana, my parents dragged me to Central Hardware, L. S. Ayres, Wm. H. Block, Hook’s Drugs, Woolworth/Woolco, Vonnegut’s, B. Dalton Booksellers, Ed Schock’s Toy & Hobby Shops, G. C. Murphy Company. Well, the Hobby Shop and bookstore they didn’t have to drag me to.
But they are all gone. Businesses come and go. They don’t last forever. Only bureaucracies do that.
Add to your list Kresge & Woolworths. You either learn how to eat lunch or you are lunch.
I remember the heralded arrival of W. T. Grant in my local area. It was going to take on K-Mart and Sears. They picked out a weird location that required a bit of adventurous driving skills to enter the parking lot. In an average year, I’d take a guess that thirty accidents occurred per year on the entry or exit out of the parking lot. Within four years, you could just sense that they’d maxed out on customers and were losing folks....by the sixth year, they shut down (not before crushing out K-Mart).
If you went and took an image of shopping in 1977, and tried to view the same shops today...it wouldn’t work. Most are gone. I can point at malls that were hyped up fifteen years ago, and are being shut-down or torn-down today. Totally different environment.