Sears and Kmart

[Clix Pix]

I definitely remember Woolworth's and also the days when drugstores had soda fountains!

Farrell's sounds vaguely familiar to me, so possibly from when my family lived in a suburb of Chicago for a while. I remember an early McDonald's opening there and what a big deal that was, and also eventually a White Castle opened in a neighboring town, providing competition in the then-new concept of fast food franchises.

 

[lizkat]

I definitely remember Woolworth's and also the days when drugstores had soda fountains!

Farrell's sounds vaguely familiar to me, so possibly from when my family lived in a suburb of Chicago for a while. I remember an early McDonald's opening there and what a big deal that was, and also eventually a White Castle opened in a neighboring town, providing competition in the then-new concept of fast food franchises.

I remember when the very first McDonald's opened in Manhattan in 1972, it was up on 96th and Broadway so not a drive-in but a walk-in (a "townhouse" I think they styled it). At that time I was working down in Wall Street days and going to school nights for extra math and science courses up at City College, in the upper upper West Side of the city, and as a result "supper" was good chance of being a missed meal on 4 nights a week and lunches were often haphazard as well.

So when the MIckey D opened at 96th of course it was huge news, but I mainly remember the next thing that popped into my head: that on the way home from school I could ride past my stop on the local train and get out at 96th, grab a burger and fries and walk the half mile back uptown to home with my prize.

I mean "fast food" was really fast at McD's compared to equally convenient but slower (if tastier) options like Chinese or Thai or Cuban food in my own neighborhood back then. I was always so famished coming out of my classes that I used to open the McD's bag on the walk uptown and start having at the fries before I got home.

I have to say though that it took awhile for aftermath of the opening day celebrations of McD's arrival in Manhattan to subside. More than a few times after the grand opening, the lines were so long even late at night that I gave up and went back uptown for the lo mein or bagels or whatever that I was more accustomed to grabbing on a weeknight after school.

 

[DT]

I hated having to drive 25 miles to a K-Mart [...]

Yeah, but that's the only place I could buy my underwear.

 

[lizkat]

Yeah, but that's the only place I could buy my underwear.

For me back then it was still about the occasional mad dash to Ames to buy some kitchen tool or dish or plate because I was still a weekend commuter and pretty broke paying for renovations, but also getting tired of dragging items back and forth between city and sticks.

Some of my trips up here were more ad hoc than others and I inevitably started just leaving important things behind. If some omission really hammered my ability to have nice meals while I was upstate, then I'd throw a hissy fit and be off to Ames, wasting precious weekend time just to buy a cheap replica of whatever was missing from my country kitchen over having left "the real thing" back in the city.

Then when Ames folded, the extra five miles in the trips to Kmart gave me more (and unwanted) time both to curse Walmart but also to think about the downside of having two residences lol. Sometimes I was so annoyed I'm lucky I even remembered what I was driving to Kmart to get. Fortunately they never failed to have whatever it was.

 

[DT]

I used to go into K-Mart without any plan, it was just to kill time, maybe score a hoodie, some caramel popcorn, a couple of Hot Wheels, and on a late Fri or Say night, a place to hit the facilities.

Hahaha, OMG, I remember one time in K-Mart, taking a beverage in (after lots of "this and that") with some friends, buying some lawn chairs, an umbrella, a couple of welcome mats (this was like 10-11p ...), talking up the cashier, and coming back to pick her up, we setup some kind of "lawn experience" in the grass at an apartment.

In retrospect, I'm not sure how I'm still here

 

[Renzatic]

But for anyone my age or older, getting the Sear's catalog in the mail was a treat.

The Christmas catalogues were always the best.

 

[Joe]

We had a Kmart in my hometown. There wasn't much to do when I was younger so sometimes I would go to Kmart just to look around and see what I could find LMAO

 

[lizkat]

We had a Kmart in my hometown. There wasn't much to do when I was younger so sometimes I would go to Kmart just to look around and see what I could find LMAO

I think when I shoplifted that doll's dress from Grants, I had been sent there by my grandma's cook to get something or other that she needed, probably carrying just about the amount of cash needed to buy it.

It was a way different time back then, very young kids were routinely sent on errands like that and no one thought twice about it. I was sometimes sent blocks away from my grandparents' house to trade sugar for butter while there was still war rationing, or to ask if such a trade could be set up with a near neighbor.

But the 40s didn't seem a time when kids just hung out at stores for amusement, for some reason. I can remember some of my younger siblings doing that later on though, when we lived in a suburban area up by Lake Ontario near Rochester. By then there were strip malls and a fancier one in the midtown area. Those became gathering places for bored teenagers who didn't have cars and so either walked there after school or took a bus if they had pocket money to do that.

By then though (1950s), parents had started to become more wary of letting really young kids go wandering around, and most thought twice about sending them on errands to nearby stores. In a way it's too bad, even if entirely understandable.

It may have stayed different for longer in rural areas. I know I had a lot of fun being let to wander wherever I wanted once my chores were done when I was really young. The limits were just "next farm over" and "stay out of the creeks in spring", so a radius of about five miles from our little farm in the Hudson Valley at that time let me discover lots of things about the natural world that would have escaped my awareness if living then in suburbia.

 

[Edd]

Interesting thing about Sears in the early days was that they sold DYI houses. They’d ship you all the materials for home construction and you built it per the instructions. I’d love to tour one of those that’s still standing.

 

[Herdfan]

It may have stayed different for longer in rural areas. I know I had a lot of fun being let to wander wherever I wanted once my chores were done when I was really young. The limits were just "next farm over" and "stay out of the creeks in spring", so a radius of about five miles from our little farm in the Hudson Valley at that time let me discover lots of things about the natural world that would have escaped my awareness if living then in suburbia.

Mine was stay out of the cave.

 

[fischersd]

We lost Sears and K-Mart in Canada long ago (they closed off their stores here first as cost cutting measures). Amazon and Walmart have eliminated a LOT of retail out there (many downtowns in small towns are boarded up now....or hasn't anyone noticed?)

 

[Yoused]

By then though (1950s), parents had started to become more wary of letting really young kids go wandering around, and most thought twice about sending them on errands to nearby stores.

My parents left us on a pretty long leash. By 4th grade, they did away with daycare and for the next 5 years, I walked the three furlongs (two if I went through the yard of the house behind us) to school and back entirely on my own. We mostly had the run of the neighborhood, and by age 11, it was normal to get on the city bus and go downtown on my own. Of course, for a young lass the situation probably would have been at least a little different.

 

[Clix Pix]

In the suburban neighborhood in which I lived during the 1950's, we walked to school together since there were several of us on the street who were around the same age anyway, and no one thought anything about a kid coming home and after school going out to play either on his or her own or with a few of the other kids, whoever was free. Ditto for the weekends. We spent Saturdays outside in nice weather, and no one's parents were arranging our schedules by implementing "playdates" for us. Some kids had music or dance lessons after school or on Saturdays, and sometimes on Saturday mornings some kids had to help their mother with housecleaning tasks before they could come out to play. We did our own thing, explored our world and that kind of freedom just doesn't seem to be possible for today's children.

We rode bikes either together or on our own, we walked and rode our bikes around the area to the local stores and a few times even to the big mall which was quite a ways away. One time a friend and I (I think we were about ten or eleven) decided that rather than walk home, we would hitchhike from wherever we'd just been, probably the mall, and so we stuck out our thumbs..... A car pulled up beside us, and it was the cop who lived in the neighborhood and who of course knew us. He read us the riot act and warned us sternly: never, never do that again. He didn't really go into details as to what bad things could happen to young girls who hitchhiked, but we got the message anyway. He drove us home to the neighborhood and that was that.

 

[Yoused]

so we stuck out our thumbs... He drove us home …

So the thing you learned from thst was .... you got a ride home, so hitchhiking works.

 

[Yoused]

It just occurred to me that where I went to grade school, adult crossing guards seemed strange, because some of us 6th-8th graders were the ones who did that.

 

[Thomas Veil]

We had a K Mart until a few years ago. The joke many people were familiar with was that they never had the specific thing you went there for. Oil filter? Yeah…for every car but yours. Light bulb? Fine, if you wanted 25W or 100W.

In its heyday they did have a fountain bar that sold hot dogs and such as well as soft drinks, but that went away a loooooong time ago.

I do remember so many other stores of that early era: Zayre’s, Gold Circle, Ames…and Woolworth. Whenever we traveled into The Big City we’d visit a Woolworth’s with creaky wooden floors and—it seemed half the time—a loose parakeet that had gotten out of the pet section, flying around the store.