RIP Big Lots, or not: Shoddy Goods 028
3Cheapskates, skinflints, tightwads: tip out some of your off-brand energy drink for the demise of a onetime giant in the field. I’m Jason Toon and this is Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell - sometimes, very cheaply. (As always, but it seems especially good to mention this time to clear up any sense of bias or angle, Shoddy Goods is from the point of view of me, Jason Toon, not Meh.)
Here’s the thing about discount retail. Sometimes wider struggles in the retail industry can work to your advantage: more overstock, more closeouts, more cheap opportunity buys. But ultimately, you’re still in the retail industry. If you’re not on top of your game - of maybe just not lucky - the same tidal waves that sink the flagships can swamp you too.
So it is with Big Lots, the latest victim of the ongoing brick-and-mortar mass extinction event, who finally announced last month that they were going out of business after a bankruptcy proceeding. All locations would hold going-out-of-business sales, as would the website, and the company would stop buying new inventory.
Last dance in Mansfield, Texas.
They’re not the only bargain-bin store suffering: some 1,000 Family Dollar stores either closed last year or will close this year. But industry watchers point out that others, like HomeGoods, are growing while Big Lots has seen sales drop every year for years. "When you look at a lot of the things it sells, you can actually get very similar products, if not better products, cheaper at places like Walmart and Target,” analyst Neil Saunders told Modern Retail.
A brief meme-stock rally couldn’t hold off the inevitable. Big Lots filed for bankruptcy in September and, after a potential sale fell through, announced in December that all of its stores would close.
The shopping dead: zombie brand rises again!
But wait! Last week, Big Lots announced that they’d struck a deal to sell between 200 and 400 stores to an outfit called Variety Wholesalers, who will keep them open under the Big Lots name. Variety Wholesalers operates discount stores across the South under brands like Roses, Maxway, and Big 10.
It’s anybody’s guess to what extent the Variety Wholesalers version of Big Lots will resemble the one that dominated the bottom of the retail pond in the 1990s and 2000s. I’ve never been to Roses; this account from 2023 explicitly positions it somewhere between Walmart and Big Lots, but with a quirkier, more opportunistic inventory in keeping with its smaller size.
The arrangement was brokered by Gordon Brothers, an investment firm who have previously liquidated enough decrepit retailers to fill a 1990s mall: KB Toys, Bed Bath & Beyond, CompUSA, The Sharper Image, Linens ‘n’ Things, Hollywood Video… I’ll give you a second to wipe away those wistful tears of nostalgia.
Superheroes never stay dead.
Will anyone miss it?
Look, I’m cheap. I’m the kind of guy who will tell you all about how little I spent on something, whether you want to hear it or not. And I’ve made my living mostly in the field of deal-driven ecommerce. I’m in the family. But I never caught the Big Lots bug. Something about it seemed even more depressing than the usual overstock atmosphere.
Maybe it was the off-putting animation style in their commercials. Maybe it was their pioneering “just ransacked” look: once retailers like Target and Walmart saw that you could get away with your stores being a total mess all the time, they stopped trying, too.
Or maybe it was Big Lots’ jarring combination of furniture and random dollar-store junk. “Save on brands like Broyhill, Swiffer, & Doritos,” their website says to this day. It never made any sense to me: who goes out to grab some Little Debbies and comes home with a leather sectional? Now that I think about it, the sheer lunacy of random inventory was probably the only thing I liked about Big Lots.
But no doubt, there will be diehards anxiously awaiting news of which of their local Big Lots stores will be saved. Some closures have already happened or been announced. The rest may be hanging in limbo for a while, as Big Lots and Variety Wholesalers told a court they’d need until April to decide which stores to keep open.
In any case, whatever form it takes, bargain-hunters in a couple of hundred American towns will still be able to walk the messy aisles of something called Big Lots for the foreseeable future. Who knows? Some of them might even stop by for some off-brand dishwasher pods and walk out with a new recliner.
They can never close out your memories.
Oddly, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Big Lots, even though you might guess I have some interest in seeing random crap sold well below it’s original prices. Maybe if they had a version where they only showed me one thing at a time. What are your favorite stores that are now gone? If you could bring back one business from the corporate graveyard, which would you pick? Chime in, and find out where everyone else loved to shop in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Hurry! For a limited time, every article in the Shoddy Goods archive is 90% off the usual price of $0! That’s a $0 savings!*
- Vanitory dreams: when Formica took glamour to the bathroom
- The true crime story of Scopitones
- How The Far Side made daily calendars a thing
*-Until the heat death of the universe
- 45 comments, 63 replies
- Comment
Any defunct BUSINESS, eh? Doesn’t have to be a chain?
Damark catalog.
@futureboy3 YES!!
@futureboy3 @RICHY531 is that the same as the DAK catalog? This came up in a discussion of old audio gear and fun things from the 1980s, and if you dig around there are some archived PDFs of old catalogs.
Just like this site, every item came with a full-page story that may or may not have much to do with the actual product, and might involve, let’s say, embellishments at times.
@pmarin @RICHY531
Might have been, or a competitor, I know I remember the name. I bought quit a few interesting pieces of technology from Damark
@futureboy3 @pmarin @RICHY531 Damark isn’t related to DAK. Both dealt with closeouts, but DAK wasn’t just about closeouts. Rather, their main focus was on electronics and they regularly went direct to a manufacturer to cut a deal.
FunaiDAK bread maker, anyone?/image DAK bread maker

I can’t help but to feel their write-ups were an inspiration to how the write-ups are done here:
https://cabel.com/2023/11/06/dak-and-the-golden-age-of-gadget-catalogs/
FWIW, DAK came from the founder’s initials – Drew Alan Kaplan.
@futureboy3 @narfcake @RICHY531 OK that makes sense. The write-ups were good. And in the days before internet you got pictures and stories of all kinds of tech. Some were semi-high-end audio which was my interest at the time in addition to computers.
I also have a different version of that breadmaker in an attic.
@futureboy3 @pmarin @RICHY531 Oh, and as for inspiration, yes. I saw @dave’s comment there.
@dave @futureboy3 @narfcake @pmarin @RICHY531 I also had that breadmaker, and it worked great. I still have a pair of the “Thunder Lizard” speakers, and the fancy equalizer DAK sold.
Think GEEK!
@jkawaguchi you mean my promo gift cards are no longer valid?
@jkawaguchi Great choice.
@jkawaguchi
Bought out and ruined by GameSlop…
Sooo sad!
The 99 Cents Only store in the pre-
private equityvulture capitalist version.I miss Kmart.
My christmas tree is from Kmart. This was probably its last year. All I’ll have to remember Kmart will be the customer loyalty card on my keychain. Just like the real Toys R Us.
@Pony @Nate311 There is just one Kmart store left in the continental US.
They’re thriving down in Australia, though. Completely different owners; it’s a huge contrast of how much management matters.
/image Kmart in Australia

Sweet Tomatoes
@jaybird are they closed? Haven’t been to one in years. I understand it was supposed to be mostly “healthy” food but the whole all-you-can-eat thing didn’t work for me (and my gut) anymore.
@pmarin they succumbed to covid in the first month. Between soup plantation and sweet tomatoes (same company), they probably had 50 locations around the country. Was a large salad bar with smaller soup, potato, and muffin bars.
@jaybird @pmarin we just had someone reopen one of their old locations about half way between here and LA. too far to go for lunch, but I had to smile
@jaybird my absolute favourite chain restaurant
Speaking of Toys-R-Us, they were fun but my days of Lego accumulation are mostly over. They had a good selection and some exclusive stuff. Also video games and Amibos.
Funny thing is that the closed Toys-R-Us location, where I used to buy Lego cars, became a Tesla dealer where I went to pick up a real car!
@pmarin
“to pick up [not] a real car!”
FIFY…
@pmarin
Sorry, I just had to…
I BLAME myself!
Mea Culpa
Farrell’s?
DAK?
Two Pesos!
@werehatrack was Farrell’s just SF Bay Area? I only knew one and as a kid me and my neighbor friend would make our parents drive us there. Was quite a drive to South San Francisco but amazing what kids can get parents to do!
@werehatrack I miss Farrell’s too
The Sharper Image! Always fond memories of going in there and seeing all kinds of cool stuff, surrounded by the scent of negative ions and ozone, heh.
Toys r Us! I have the receipt for the very last sale made at my store, just before it closed forever, and many memories of buying my game consoles there as a kid.
The original Quiznos Subs! The Steakhouse Beef Dip remains one of the best sandwiches I have ever had.
Sound Advice! The last nationwide chain where you could preview audio and video equipment that was WAY more expensive than what you find at Best Buy…many afternoons spent there enjoying massive TVs and thousands of watts of audio power inside their screening rooms.
The American Locomotive Company! A pipe dream, obviously, but I sure would love to see what a modern Alco widecab diesel would be like. They shut up shop in 1969 after over 100 years, starting with steam engines and ending with the C636, though the actual last thing they built was a T-6 transfer switcher.
@PooltoyWolf They finally removed the (still lit) sign from the local Toys R Us that closed in 2018. In the past week. I noticed it yesterday. Pretty sure it was still up on Saturday. The entrance sign is still up and lit, though. It’s always struck me as unnecessarily cruel.
A photo of me with store employees at the very end of the last opening day of my local Toys R Us store. It’s currently a Conn’s HomePlus, itself on borrowed time.
@PooltoyWolf
@narfcake @PooltoyWolf
What was the location of TRU here is now an Ollie’s and seems to be thriving.
@narfcake @phendrick We like Ollie’s!
Big lots is shutting down a distribution center in Montgomery. Almost 500 people got a WARN notice Christmas eve!
@chienfou
And while Banana Republic still nominally exists I do miss their quirky catalogs from the 80s…
@chienfou I remember there was a time when there was a certain coolness of Banana Republic stuff. Then the “kids these days” moved on to trendier stuff.
@chienfou When Banana Republic first opened in our market, they had some actual military surplus and a lot of faux military surplus, and a Jeep in every store for ambiance. I am still surprised by their slow descent into business casual.
@mossygreen
Yeah they were initially a kind of “safari chic” and wandered away from their niche.
@chienfou
…and the awesome stuff they used to sell…
KRULL! A SKULL! BRETT HULL! AWESOME!
Nobody has said CompUSA yet?
Best/worst thing was the free-after-rebate deals. It became a weekend expedition. Then spend the rest of the day doing rebate forms.
As I go through old things in a home office I’m finding new boxes of vintage-2000 computer stuff I never used, with just the UPC cut out.
@pmarin
Still happens to me as well. Circuit City was another source as well as Office Depot. Ran across a couple of copies of Dragon (speech recognition) the other day.
Only West coast people will know this, but Fry’s Electronics. Started in Sunnyvale CA and back then you could buy a lot of electronic components there too (if you were building/fixing your own stuff). Over time and expansion to many locations became a not-very-good TV and computer store.
@pmarin The Fry’s I knew in the 1990’s died in the early 2010’s. In that time, they definitely contributed to the demise of almost every small computer store in their vicinity. When Fry’s was selling motherboards at retail for less than what vendors were selling to smaller stores at wholesale, how could they compete?
Towards the end …
Barring the embezzlement scandal, much of their demise was of their own doing. They didn’t take E-commerce seriously in the early 2000s, allowing Newegg and later Amazon to take a huge chunk of online sales. Also in the 2000s, their sales tactics in store had staff essentially backstab each other over pennies of commission. And as a clue to their stubborn ways, they only discontinued their 56K dial-up internet service in 2020.
Dial-up. 2020.
In the final years, their corporate credit was so horrible that the only way they could get merchandise was on consignment. After their closing, there were reports that some vendors didn’t even bother picking up their inventory that they left at Fry’s to sell.
It wasn’t worth anything.
@pmarin I came here to say this. I miss this place and the totally insane black friday sales with lines of people 500 deep
Radioshack, obviously. Imagine if they avoided the shady cell phone vendor mess, and had jumped on the maker-space, arduino/rpi/smart devices, SDR, and 3D printing bandwagons… They just missed them all by a few years.
Related, AllElectronics went out of business not too long ago, I only ordered from them every few years, but they were a closeout outfit too.
@caffeineguy
Yes, they unfortunately missed the maker wave. Now there would be room for a hobby store that isn’t scrap booking. That niche is still wide open.
@caffeineguy I too miss Rat Shack the most. Some SA country (Argentina or Brazil?) Own the trademark and have stores there, with the indications they may bring back brick-and-mortar stores here in the future. They have an online presence.
I’m kind of surprised Carvel’s (ice cream franchise) is still around.
The Atlantic coast (and possibly beyond) has Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, which makes Big Lots look like West Elm.
Current Bargain Ad Flyer | Ollie’s Bargain Outlet https://search.app/rGS4tYidbFboJXzp6
@Sardinicus
Have one in Montgomery
When Big Lots was Big and Small Lots, it was an interesting store. Messy, but you never knew what bargain you would find. Then, they tried to become a mainstream store selling the same crap as Walmart, only at a higher price. Next, they added low line furniture. I only bought there when they offered a 20% off Friends and Family day. I knew a day trader who would buy and sell Big Lots stock frequently, as it was so variable he could make money on it. I suspect the frequent F&F days were to solve cash flow problems.
I grew up in a town of about 1,500 people and downtown we had a V&S Variety. Apparently they’re still around as independent stores, but ours turned into a Duckwalls. My understanding is that in 2010 the parent company decided, in their infinite wisdom, to shut all of the small-town stores down, including the ones making money, and went all in on their mid-market Alco stores that always seemed like K-Marts with a drinking problem. Unsurprisingly , it didn’t work. The local hardware store owners set up an independent “general store” for a time, but it ended up closing down as well, leaving the options of mail order or driving 30+ miles to a Wal-Mart.
I used to work for RCA and they sold a lot of refurbished goods to Big Lots. Defective items were sent to a warehouse on Spur Drive in Soccoro, TX, supposedly for repair. We said broken crap was just unloaded off a truck on one side of the warehouse and then loaded on another truck to go to Big Lots.
the Warner Brothers store, where I could get Loony Tunes sweatshirts, and Taz watches, and Sylvester anything
@user82233815 I would place this pic of their NYC flagship store that I found off a quick search as between 1994 to 1996. So 1995-ish – which I refuse to admit was 30 years ago!

I love a bargain but that means getting good quality for cheap. Big Lots sold low quality for cheap.
@smccorm2001 Cheap is also overstating the value of their business model. They sold low quality for more expensive than you could typically get the same products elsewhere.
Our local one after the bankruptcy had people out waving signs saying
[extremely small]up to[/extremely small]
90% off everything in store!
Anything we would be remotely interested in was at the very low end of that range, mostly 0% off, which is a pretty bold discount to select for one’s closing down sale.
The only value we ever found in that store was that you could use their bathroom.
Service Merchandise, anyone?
@foreverrestless Yes! I forgot about that place. I used to go there with my grandma a lot. She was a serious jewelry shopper. I don’t remember what else they sold besides jewelry, though.
@foreverrestless @user05292654
They sold a bunch of household stuff. You ordered on a sheet of paper and they pulled it from the back of the store and sent it out in a container on a conveyor belt…
@foreverrestless First and best and most missed other than Woolworths
Two Guys. My first exposure to retail markdowns as a kid, loved going to the store in the 70s.
@andymacbride
Did they make 3 new friends and branch out to 'burgers?
@andymacbride
same!
Plus Christmas shopping- all the presents I bought for my whole family in 1 trip.
There’s another chain of closeout stores that recently went bankrupt and closed - Dirt Cheap. They were mostly in the mid-South - not near where I live, but I would visit them anytime I was road tripping through there.
They sold a lot of returns, overstocks, etc from Target and other retailers. Their pricing was basically a Dutch auction - they would price everything and then take a percentage off, and increase the percentage as the stuff sat. They would even take the last dregs of stuff, throw it in a cart, and sell the contents of the cart for $10 - they called it a “bargain buggy”. Instead of a BOC, it was a COC - Cart of Crap.
I liked it when it was McFrugal.
BigLots!
But years ago when it was opportunistic and random. I used to go there for their international food aisle. It was stuff you can’t find at Walmart but maybe for twice the price at a grocery store for the better classes. Pindjur, ajvar, interesting olives, sometimes imported chocolate for half the price. As if food trucks going to World-market or Trader Joes randomly lost some of their pallets. Belgian chocolate, real not the palm-oil knockoff, Sauerkraut from Germany, name brand. Swedish crackers, British cookies, some Asian sauces. And you could try it all for half the price.
Than they got bigger and it gradually changed. The German Sauerkraut came from Poland, the European chocolate wasn’t the real thing anymore. It looked like it was made for BigLots to resemble the real thing but using cheaper ingredients. A Bait-and-Switch like Aldi does.
Interesting food became less and less, the furniture section increased. Not even interesting furniture. Mission style particle board.
Most of the times I went, I couldn’t find anything interesting anymore. Over the last few years, I probably went twice a year, to see where this is going and got the feeling that this is going towards the dump.
Same feeling I had at K-Mart when I found ice-cleats still on an end cap in Spring and they wanted full price. The sales person acted like I was an intruder to their quiet store. A year later they were bankrupt.
And I honestly do get the same feeling at Target and at JCPenney. Last time I was at the local JCPenney, it was so empty I was afraid of getting locked in. I know of people who avoid JCPenney and drive to the bigger city to shop at a better … JCPenney. I mostly avoid Target. Last time I looked for a kid´s swimsuit, I was first ignored, till a bored sales person came over to complain, that we messed up her cloth racks too much. The only reason they survive, is the fact that they are the last stores there.
@formfeed Oof, even the most recent iteration at least had dolma-in-a-can for fairly cheap (but no more Indian packaged sauces/ sides). Last time I went, I thought “Surely this is enough to last a while!”
sigh
@brainmist Oh I forgot, stuffed grape leafs. Made in Turkey. I got those as well.
@formfeed absolutely this. I used to go to look at the unusual snacks, teas, etc.
Then they got rid of almost everything and just filled the place with furniture. Someone probably said “if we sell furniture instead we can make more profit on selling one sofa than we can 100 bags of obscure potato chips”… Ruined it for me. Stopped going.
I miss ThinkGeek.
Also, pre-amazon WOOT
Other than that, all my favorite, non-chain restaurants have gone out of business.
I don’t go out to eat at all anymore.
@simeon527 Oooof, that was a while ago. They did some very fascinatingly awful bottled beverages.
@simeon527
The only place that had decent Unicorn meat.
@simeon527
ThinkGeek was my jam- and they always had excellent April Fools gags.
Their customer monkeys were always so helpful too!
We still have some of their dreck hanging on for dear life- e.g., ceramic Zombie Head and Xenomorph Egg AKA Ovomorph cookie jars, and a Zombie Head mug come to mind immediately.
Toys R Us, for sure. Shopping for toys at Walmart, or online, just isn’t the same. Nothing but a dedicated toy store has the variety or allows the shopper to see, touch and try the toys in person.
@user05292654
I moved to Boston Mass for about a year to train as a store manager for them in 1984, in order to come back to open and work in the Rochester, NY store.
Then I went to Cleveland, OH for [a year/one week] to help with their en-mass interviewing and hiring process to open the Ohio markets.
They were, for a time, a well organized money-making machine, and a fierce competitor.
They purposely opened many of their stores within a mile of a Kiddie City or other competing toy store and then undercut their prices on the most popular items specifically to force them out of business.
For a while they were hugely profitable…
Then they were bought in $7.5 billion leveraged buyout in 2005 by private investors Bain Capital Partners, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and Vornado Realty Trust, which assigned all the debt to the company, leaving the investors free to walk away with all the money, and the company left servicing a debt load that was 100% of its revenue at the time of bankruptcy.
But…
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/5-years-after-closing-its-stores-toys-r-us-made-an-ambitious-announcement-heres-why-it-just-might-work.html
and in 2025 they are planning to open stores in Central and South America…
I miss KMart. I still have some 30 year old Jaclyn Smith clothes I like and wear, I loved looking through the store, seasonal stuff, and buying plants and flowers for the garden in the spring and summer. We also had a store called Home Bazaar that had an odd assortment of nice items but it may have been local to NC.
Media Play comes to mind for me even though alot of stuff was over priced. When their stores were closing I was going through a divorce and used those stores for some serious retail therapy. I scored alot of comedy cd’s for super cheap.
Herter’s - for background, look at George Leonard Herter’s entry in Wikipedia, and the referenced article in the New York Times.
Big Lots started out in Ohio as Odd Lots. It was mostly a closeout store and was way better.
@theredtiburon Got that right.
Christmas Tree Shops, prior to when Bed, Bath & Beyond bought and destroyed them.
Circuit City. I used to be able to negotiate a better price on display items. I miss that
Just gonna say, @dave, whenever I’ve made sad noises about an IRK containing a replacement for my tragically tree-in-a-derecho obliterated gazebo, and then gazebo mark 2, which I bought thinking “Hey, I’ve got some still usable parts, why not?” (and then it was demolished by multiple rounds of insane winds), those were both Big Lots gazebos (specifically, Sunjoy Manhattan).
So if, as you’re picking the carcass of yet another business not able to adapt to the desert quickly enough, you find one? You could do a very fun thing.
(And I would post pictures of its glory and absolutely inevitable demise.)
((I really liked that gazebo.))
(((The weather? Did not. Kind of like semi-literate gamers. )))
Dread Gazebo
@brainmist (I realized “picking the carcass” might seem pejorative; it’s absolutely not. Meh takes things that would have gone to waste and finds a new market.
Or puts them in IRKs for amusement value.
)
Black Friday. Mostly Amazon returns. Think there are just a couple left. Montgomery store died during COVID. Classic case of bad timing. A metric shit-ton of merchandise in bins you rummage thru with price per item dropping each day for a week then re-stocked and start over. Found some awesome deals there on stuff people didn’t know what it was.
POPSOCKETS! SPROCKETS! DAVY CROCKETT! AWESOME!
@chienfou Stores like Montgomery Ward and Sears were dying for a long time. Before Sears/ KMart went under, there were some great deals to be had online…especially when whatever group conglomerated them offered credit for purchases.
I got some really fabulous stuff before the obvious bubble collapsed.
@chienfou there are several stores like this in downtrodden shopping centers in rougher areas of my town where rent must be cheaper, all independent from the looks of it. Some even reference Amazon in the name, one was AMZDeals I think.
I kind of want to go but being employed am not generally able to go in the morning on restock day when one would assume the best things are there and get snapped up. I went to one of them on the weekend and it was fairly dismal but with a few treasures buried amongst the junk.
If I could bring back any one store? Can it be a restaurant?
In the late '70s/ early '80s, there was a restaurant, maybe chain? called Sea Fare.
Anyone else remember this place?
They were like a weird LJS alternative, except they seemed to use more real fish.
Anyway. They did a fried-smelt deal. I vaguely remember it as a thing I went to, and a residual smell. And I really want to try it again.
@brainmist
PoFolks used be a lot bigger chain ‘back in the day’. Used to like their food when they had a local store a LONG time ago.
@chienfou I’ll bet they had a killer menu.
For me, Big Lots was was DOA on April 17, 2002, when Pic 'N Save officially changed its name to Big Lots, and with it, its brand philosophy and marketing direction.
For those who don’t remember Pic 'N Save was a true bargain-basement, remainders-only, clearance retailer. They literally picked up as many weird, old, discontinued products as they could for pennies on the dollar, and retailed them out to oddballs, weird-ohs and cheapskates (like me!) who were looking for last-year’s solutions for as little as possible.
At Pic 'N Save, you could get a case of Frostie root beer for $5.00, a 50-pack of TDK C-90 Chrome cassette blanks for $15.00, and a discontinued-model Wheel Horse lawnmower for $40.00. Once, I walked out with two old-style, genuine AT&T 10-key desk phones, new in their '80s Phone Store boxes, for $10 each. You literally never knew what you’d find there - which was what made it such a great store.
All that changed when they restructured, rebranded, and re-leveraged themselves as Big Lots. Suddenly, whoever was running the place decided they wanted to be a cut-rate Target. Now they were too good to buy remaindered stock, sell last-year’s tech, peddle off-brand potato chips made in Pewaukee. No - they had to go UPmarket, where the money was (presumably). And so began a long decline: their original fan base deserted them when the quirky deals left. The lowest-price-wins bargain shoppers left when Dollar Tree came to town. And if you were just shopping for home essentials, people soon found out you get those for MUCH cheaper prices at the Wal-Mart cross-town.
The final nail was when they started carrying big furniture, branded as “Broyhill” by the captive offshore manufacturer who’d bought that storied name out of the ashes of the bankrupt old-line company - same as with other once-premier US trademarks like RCA, Westinghouse and Craftsman.
At the end, Big Lots was just a crap sale of discounted Barbies, Lowes-quality patio furniture and overpriced ibuprofen. Nothing interesting, nothing to make you go “oh wow!”, nothing to make you open your wallet at all. Our last time through, my wife and I looked at each other and said “there’s nothing here we need or want”, and walked out.
I’m glad to see them go.
Blockbuster.
I wasn’t alive in the 80’s/90’s, so I would like to see how my parents day-to-day was like.
@Wollyhop
Early Netflix and Redbox did them in.
@Wollyhop I guess you could make a pilgrimage to Bend Oregon, home of the only remaining store.
https://bendblockbuster.com/
@chienfou @Wollyhop I miss Netflix, back when it was not just a bunch of unwatchable crap and had good content.
We loved our Woolworths store. It was in the Boulevard Mall in Las Vegas and we kids absolutely loved going there and finding things to try and talk Mom into buying for us.
@duodec
I remember Ben Franklin’s as well.
STL also had a “big lots style” store called Grandpa Pigeons.
And Venture was a Target clone store.
@duodec …along with Consumer’s, Odd Jobs, Jack’s 99 or less, and the occasional Jembro… But I’m more chasing a nostalgic feeling than actually wanting these stores to be back in today’s economy (where even the Dollar General is charging 3~5$ per item).
@duodec @pakopako
Yep. I think that ship sailed when DollarTree became “Buck-&-a-Quarter” store.
My local Big Lots clerk told me they have two more merchandise shipments incoming, and they’ll be closed by Feb 28.
I thought Goody’s had closed down all their stores… Then about two years ago was driving through a small town in the middle of nowhere and saw one still up and running. I was very surprised.
Used to be my go to clothing store when I was a late teen/early 20.
There is a Roses in a town a half hour away where some friends live and we sometimes visit. I’d never been enticed by its appearance and location but having read that article I’m definitely going there the next chance I get.
Radio shack. They were the ultimate geeky place to grab some batteries, solder, a new switch or perhaps an rc car or other random stuff! I still miss them