I got to thinking (for some reason) about stores I remembered as a kid.

It turns out that the "BEST" warehouse-showroom stores (where a lot of the family appliances came from in the 70s and early 80s, and which I remember best for those weird lady in the rain lamps) are gone now - according to Wikipedia, they went bankrupt.

But Acme is still there. And yes, it's THAT Acme, not the one based in Philadelphia. (I grew up in Summit County, Ohio). Acme #4 was within walking distance of my house.

I always thought, when I was a kid, that it was funny "our" grocery store was named Acme - because of the Acme Corporation in the Roadrunner cartoons. (It turns out - live and learn - that Acme wasn't just a funny name; in Wile E. Coyote Universe it apparently stood for A Company that Makes Everything. Heh.)

(Of course, "Acme" also means the same thing as "zenith" or "the best," which is probably why so many real companies adopted it as their name).

Other stores gone? Woolworth, TG & Y, Handy Andy (a Home Depot type place with a sort-of Village-People-esque mascot), probably others that weren't big chains or haven't entered the hive-mind of Wikipedia yet. (I think the Noble Roman's pizza chain is gone. And Little Caesar's is very nearly gone, at least in my part of the country. And I think Burger Chef - which was a McDonald's-esque chain that I just barely remember - is gone too).

Polsky's (which I think was just an Akron-area department store) closed when I was a kid. My dad bought lots of stuff at their liquidation sale; for years I had a massive wood desk (with a typewriter drawer on the right-hand side) in my bedroom that came from them.

And Halle's is gone, but they were moribund before I was even in high school.

(I wonder if O'Neil's, the other big Akron-area department chain, still lives?

Oh, no, it's gone. Bought out by blasted Macy's. I'm kind of coming to hate Macy's; they seem to buy up a lot of the small regional chains, claim they won't change a thing, and then a few months later erase any kind of individuality and put their name on the store. Sad. O'Neil's was the default "good-clothes-shopping" place, and also, the big old downtown one was where they did Breakfast with Santa.

I wonder how many kids now have the experience of going to a big fancy "downtown" department store - not one part of a mall - and shopping there and then eating lunch in the tearoom or the coffee shop. It seems like such a 1950s thing now, but I did it with my mom and dad when I was a kid.

Wow, and Lazarus - the big Columbus version of O'Neils - is gone too. Yes, another meal for Macy's. [there is something a wee bit ironic about a store named Lazarus being a goner...])

And Montgomery Ward, affectionately known as "Monkey Ward."

Oh, and Gold Circle. I always liked the toy department at Gold Circle when I was a kid. They were kind of like Target is today, but maybe not quite as fancy as Target is.

Oh, and Eagle Food Centers, which was the preferred grocery once my family had moved to Illinois...a former employee of the chain said, regretfully, "they were too generous with their employees" and she believed that was part of the reason.


I have to admit some sadness (especially at all the smallish, regional chains being subsumed into the Macy's monster). All of these things I knew from my childhood, all these things I remember as being a part of the Akron area, gone. But I suppose that's how it is, isn't it? Nothing stays the same; few retail outlets seem to hang on for terribly long unchanged.

People around here talk about stores (like a Penney's!) that used to exist downtown before the malls opened and everyone had a car, and driving to Sherman became a sort of everyday thing. (Perhaps one tiny silver lining with high gas prices? Maybe more stores will return to smaller towns, and actually be viable, because it's cheaper to buy locally than to drive to the mall some distance away.)

And I guess now that Macy's has bought so many of the chains, it's better they have their name on it rather than have some kind of strange zombie O'Neils with all Macy's products, or some weird undead Famous-Barr with the Famous-Barr skin stretched over what was really a Macy's. (another one gone - but since they were St. Louis-based, I didn't really have a chance to form an attachment before they disappeared)