Is there any truly "local" retail left?

[thatcrazycajun]

I was just ruminating on the disappearance of many local and regional retailers and companies with decades of service and tradition behind them in the wake of corporate consolidation. Frex, here in the Atlanta area the Rich's chain of department stores was eaten a couple years ago by Federated Stores, which replaced them with co-branded Rich's-Macy's stores and then finally with just the Macy's brand. Where I used to live some years back in the Washington, DC area, People's Drug got subsumed by the CVS behemoth and Woodward & Lothrop, a local department store chain, and Hechinger's, a hardware outfit, simply got driven out of business entirely by Hecht's and The Home Depot, respectively. And in my home city of New Orleans, Rite Aid earned my undying enmity by buying out and obliterating the fine old K&B Drug Stores chain after having promised to retain the name in some fashion. This after Dillard's department stores ate both D. H. Holmes and Maison Blanche in that same region.

Then, of course, there's the whole banking and telecoms industries, which are seeing fish get swallowed by bigger and bigger fish repeatedly. In DC, Sovran Bank got eaten by NationsBank, which in turn got eaten by Bank of America; and here in Atlanta BellSouth, one of the last remnants of the old Bell System, is about to get eaten by the new Frankenstein's monster created from the merger of SBC and AT&T's long-distance business. Also here, SouthTrust Bank had just barely completed their big new HQ building when they got eaten by Wachovia and had to buy a big new sign to replace the first big new one they'd just put up. Even in the city of my birth, Lafayette, LA, most of the old local banks' names are gone, replaced by out-of-town super-regional banks such as Hibernia and BankOne.

So I was wondering: do y'all have any favorite local stores or businesses that died off or were killed in this fashion that you miss? How much of your area's unique regional character remains...and how much has been destroyed by the metastasization of corporate gigantism?

Comments

[cellio]

We've lost local drug stores, grocers, and bookstores, all of which I miss. We still have local (that is, non-chain) restaurants, clothing stores, and specialty stores (like the Chocolate Moose for confections, Kosher Mert, art-supply shops, and jewelers).

Most of what's hurting our local, neighborhood-based stores is malls in large complexes that make the neighborhood shopping districts less of a destination. So some shops close because that extra little bit really mattered, and others move to the malls where they then get lost in the noise of all the big places. It's sad; I walk down the main street of my neighborhood and there's not as much there as there used to be.

Megamergermania

[netpositive.livejournal.com]

I think there are still -- technically -- Woodward & Lothrop stores left around here, at Tyson's and Pentagon City. Did you maybe mean Bamberger's, which the Macy's monster bought a long time ago? And to merge two of your threads into one, Federated has also bought Hecht's, and has just completed converting all the Hecht's into Macy's.

The thing I find most ironic is (1) the number of banks that I never heard of before, apparently just starting up around here, plus (2) the number of new brick-and-mortar bank buildings being built! Here I thought the Internet was going to eliminate face-to-face banking [as it basically has for me; other than the rare use of the credit union service center for certified checks and certain deposits I want to make absolutely sure happen, I haven't been in a real physical bank since... at least 20 years ago].

[tovahs.livejournal.com]

So much has changed in the 10 years that I have been gone. A lot of my landmarks aren't here anymore. They even moved 1 highschool and renamed my Highschool.

In NOLA you forgot Delchamps that went under. Along with how the mega WAL-Mart eats everything in its path.

What ever happend to "Mr Jingle" anyways?

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

You mean Mr. Bingle? I'm not sure what happened to him. And I had not heard about Delchamps going away, though I do recall Schwegmann's being eaten by Sav-A-Center. (For those not in the know, Mr. Bingle was the giant snowman character that used to hang on the front of Maison Blanche's downtown Canal Street store in New Orleans around Christmas season; he was featured in that chain's holiday marketing for many years.)

[wolfette]

recently the department store chain "House of Fraser" bought out our local independant, family run department store - the oldest department store in the same premises in Europe "Jenners".

Sure, they kept the name, but the first thing they did was to sack all the Jenners' buying staff (after promising there would be no redundancies) - so now instead of the quality unique merchandise the store was known for, they're selling Fraser's brand name merchandise. That's not to say that Fraser's stuff is *crap* - just that one would prefer to have a more varied choice....... and as House of Fraser have a store at one end of Princes Street, and Jenners is at the other end (less than a mile away), sooner or later one suspects they'll close one of them down.

[mneme]

Oh, I don't know -- at least in NYC, despite the growth of the nationwides, we also get plenty of small chains (despite the sad death a decade ago of the original Shakespere and Co. bookstore, they've still got smaller stores throughout the city; I tend to eat breakfast at Financeer, a great tiny-chain pastry shop with 3 branches, all downtown; my favorite frequent Chinese eaterie is Grand Sichuan, a small nyc-bound chain of "actual Chinese food" resturants with lots of spicy fare) and even individual stores (Collesium Books reopened; all our favorite sushi places are singletons, and the discount store I bought containers in (and, really, most of the stores, aside from 3/5 of the accessable drugstores, Sunnyside, Queens) was also a stand-alone).

I have mixed feelings on the chains -- they squeeze out lone stores and tend to homogenize the country, thus making it much harder for new ideas and practices to spread...but they do increase baseline quality a fair bit, providing a consistency that can often be better than the previous norm for an area (of course, they'll also lower their services once they gained a monopoly in an area, and while -some- of what they're selling is a certain level of baseline quality, their other advantages -- name recognition and economy of scale due to selling the same thing everywhere, aren't things that I find appealing). In general, they're much better for things that really benefit the consumer on these levels (drug stores, frex, and to a lesser degree, supermarkets) and worse when the individuality of the market is part of the point -- but they will also do somewhat worse in those situations (despite the prevalence of chain restaurants, you won't see them squeezing out local restaurants any time soon on a wide scale -- unique restaurants have a market all their own!

[filkferengi]

Interesting topic!

I miss Woolworth's.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

So do I; however, Woolworth's was as much done in by its own blunders as by marketplace consolidation and Wal-Mart competition. There's a wonderful book, REMEMBERING WOOLWORTH'S by Karen Plunkett-Powell, which tells you everything you could possibly want to know about the five-and-dime pioneer's rise and ignominious fall. Amazon.com has it in both hardback and paperback editions, and I highly recommend it.

[filkferengi]

Sounds like the way[s] the former Oxford Books stupided itself out of business.

Thanks for the heads-up!