Nows and Forevers

When you go through old newspapers, you’re struck by how many retailers are no longer with us.

I’m not talking about the retailers that are still around but shadows of what they once were: I’m looking at you, Sears and Kmart. I’m talking about stores that were vital in the ‘70s and ‘80s and into the ‘90s and are long gone.

Caldor’s. Lechmere. Bradlees. Nobody Beats the Whiz. Crazy Eddie’s. Ames.

I could go on.

When I was looking up the old Black Friday stories from the ‘90s I edited, I saw every one of those names. They were all pretty big deals when I was growing up in the 1970s and the 1980s, and I still shopped in every one in 1995, with the exception of Crazy Eddie’s which imploded in 1989. Those stories drew a lot of shoppers even in 1995.

Probably the biggest one for me was Caldor’s, which was a department store located on a bluff overlooking my hometown and the go-to department store for my parents. Maybe we weren’t there every week, but it sure felt like it. And, in 1970s Connecticut, you could only go to a store like that six days a week because of the Blue Laws.

If you grew up in Connecticut or New York, you probably remember Caldor’s. The first store was opened in Port Chester, New York, in 1951 by a young couple, Carl and Dorothy Bennett. (Carl+Dorothy = Caldor). You wanted a baseball bat, you went to Caldor’s. You wanted a TV or a radio, you went to Caldor’s. You wanted a new coffeemaker, yep, you went to Caldor’s. They even had a stamp and coin counter at my local Caldor’s, and I still have some old stamps and first-day covers I bought there. And I bought a lot of 33RPMs at Caldor’s, too, before Tower Records came to Manhattan.

Good times.

There were other, slicker stores. Bradlees and especially Lechmere were better lit and had different items. (Plus Bradlees had Mrs. B in their ads. “Nobody can buy like Mrs. B,” they said.) Ames was also around but it didn’t really appeal to me much. I only went there when I had to, and I made sure, even in rural Maine when I lived there, that it wasn’t that often.

Neither Caldor’s nor Lechmere made it past the ‘90s. Bradlees closed in 2001 and Ames lasted until the next year. Nobody Beats The Wiz, from my Google search, closed in 2003.

What killed them? The shopping mall, Walmart and Target, and the early days of Amazon.com were factors. So were the overleveraged companies that bought them for too much when the future prospects were far too little. It’s fair to say that the retailing world moved on without them.

And while we didn’t know it back in ‘95, these stores days were numbered.