Someone on PointBuzz referred to the old discount department store called Uncle Bill's, which I now understand to be local to the Cleveland area in the 70's. I haven't thought about that in many decades. But the funny thing is, it triggers a bunch of other defunct store memories.
There was Zayre, which people called "Zayre's." Just the name of it wakes up memories of the tile floors, the shopping carts, and the logo with an asterisk before it. Then there was Gold Circle, which I think had a location near my childhood home. Do you remember Best? They had the, uh, best Christmas catalogs, and their stores were weird because most of them were built as a showroom, and you had to buy stuff and they would bring out the product. Radio Shack lasted much longer, and in high school I remember buying some minor electronic parts to hack speaker jacks into my boombox or a switch for my model rocket launcher. Of course, everyone knows K-Mart and Sears, which combined to suck even more before disappearing. I worked at an Ames in high school, which I recall actually bought the Zayre locations in the Cleveland area. I closed that one when it went out of business, and bought a lot of crap cheap. That one was down the street from us in Brunswick, and it was later turned into a movie theater, which was extra weird having spent so much time in that building.
As a kid, it was fun to visit the toy sections of those stores while my mom shopped for whatever. It was kind of torture, because while I would inevitably get some of the things I desperately wanted for Christmas, most I obviously did not. It was especially rough when I got a little older and wanted an Atari 2600 or one of their early 8-bit computers.
These days we're down to Target and Walmart, and I rarely enter either one. I miss the dopamine hit of shopping for stuff I didn't really need. I suppose for a lot of people that has been replaced with social media likes, but I don't have a replacement.
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