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Now you got me thinking of a cool cafe I used to go to in Cork City in the late 90's-early 00's called Tribes. It was what would nowadays be considered hipster-ish, but it was this quiet little hovel on a street dominated by bars and hairdressers. This place pretty much fit the hipster hangout bill of having weird outsider art on the walls, tables and chairs that didn't match, random curtains hanging up in bizarre places on the ceiling, and a mannequin covered in newspaper scraps just hanging out in the middle of the seating area. It was a cool vibe before that vibe became more commonplace. Then it closed down and was replaced by a lovely pizza place called Speedo's. There was also another cool hangout cafe down the street called the Gingerbread House. It was never 'busy', always lightly packed, with teenagers just drinking coffee and hot chocolate. In the winter months, one of their baristas would open up a hot donut vending stand at the doorway and sell bags of fresh roasting hot sugared donuts. I loved getting a bag of donuts on a cold day and wandering into the Gingerbread House for a hot chocolate just to sit for an hour or so and read a book. I don't even know the name of the restaurant that replaced it, but the whole area where the Gingerbread House was has become so desolate in the last few years cuz the city council wanted to stop teenagers hanging around in the area so a lot of the smaller hangout places had their rents jacked the gently caress up to force them out.
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Nov 22, 2022 15:23
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The mentions of Chuck E. Cheese reminded me of a reward program they had. You would bring in your report card and they'd give you something like 2 arcade tokens for every A; 1 token for every B. It actually inspired me to make sure to at least get an A- vs. a B+ in a class.
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Nov 22, 2022 15:39
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Possibly a regional southern US thing, but Zayre department stores. I only ever saw one. I remember a buddy and me stealing a copy of Alyssa Milano's VHS teen workout video Teen Steam from there,, in 1988 Years later I met her and told her about it. She laughed.
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Nov 22, 2022 16:33
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Strange Cares posted:There used to be a great little tea shop called Tealuxe in Harvard Square with this weird little copper tables and a pretty good selection of tea. It was super cozy and I spent a lot of time there over the years, even though they didn't have a bathroom so you'd have to go down the street to piss .
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Nov 22, 2022 17:52
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We were playing some browser game where people walk through a city with video on and you can guess where in the world it is and it's super depressing how the entire western world and a shocking amount of the rest has the exact same chain restaurants. Like the architecture might (MIGHT) be a little different but god drat this world sucks
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Nov 22, 2022 17:59
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isaboo posted:Possibly a regional southern US thing, but Zayre department stores. I only ever saw one. There was a at least one in either Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was very young but I remember I liked pushing the big Z on the door.
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Nov 23, 2022 14:58
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Internetjack posted:The mentions of Chuck E. Cheese reminded me of a reward program they had. You would bring in your report card and they'd give you something like 2 arcade tokens for every A; 1 token for every B. It actually inspired me to make sure to at least get an A- vs. a B+ in a class. Oh yeah there was a bowling alley in Seattle that did that and was super generous like five games of bowling for every A and three for every B, you’d end up with a lot of bowling. Although they probably earned it back from me with their Marvel vs Capcom cabinet.
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Nov 23, 2022 15:19
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Things Oh, remember that shop that sold cheap crap but also those highly detailed trolls, i think they had dicks some times,
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Nov 23, 2022 16:10
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I miss print catalogs. Flipping through the 1980s American Girl catalog was mind-boggling. Like, seeing the stuff in person would have been less astonishing. It was amazing to just see the photos and imagine it. Kristen Larson with her blue cotton print dress and fake food. Incredible. (Although I had Samantha.) Doctor Butts posted:There was also so much more variety in styles, overall, because of the smaller stores. It's not just clothes, though. Small craft stores with weird stuff like wool embroidery yarn and chair caning supplies are really hard to find. So are independent fabric stores (everybody buys fabric online). Even the chain A. C. Moore, which was around forever, got bought out and shut down by Michaels; and Hancocks shut down all its stores like five years ago and now only sells online. Literally the only places around me to find non-quilting fabric are JoAnn Fabrics stores, and they've been removing good stuff like 100% silk for years. Fabric stores used to have entire tables of rayon prints. Now it's all godawful polyester. Malls themselves are like a dying breed. There's a site called deadmalls.com where you can look up dead and dying malls in your area. I found two that I remember and the flashbacks were intense.
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Nov 23, 2022 16:25
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RapturesoftheDeep posted:Was this a Philly-area thing? Because I vaguely remember it having something to do with Strawbridge and Clothier. That whole genre of Woolworth-type stores that were midway between a CVS, a dollar store, and a big box store was definitely a big thing into the early 90s. So were stores like Best where you went in to order out of a catalog and they would make you sit for a half hour or so until they fished it out of the warehouse in the back. Yeah, it was a Philly region store, per wikipedia a subsidiary of Strawbridges, which is another candidate for the thread. I guess one was too much like CVS, and the other too much like Macy's to survive the internet
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Nov 23, 2022 16:47
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trickybiscuits posted:I miss print catalogs. Flipping through the 1980s American Girl catalog was mind-boggling. Like, seeing the stuff in person would have been less astonishing. It was amazing to just see the photos and imagine it. Kristen Larson with her blue cotton print dress and fake food. Incredible. (Although I had Samantha.) Yeah catalogs were great. My mom called them "wishbooks" when I was a kid. Turns out that was what sears called theres which honestly seems like a brilliant piece of marketing, but she called them all that, like calling all soft drinks coca cola lol. Magazines in general were nice. I love the gloss on the photos. The pages would shine like diamonds sometimes if they caught the light right
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Nov 23, 2022 17:16
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Milo and POTUS posted:Yeah catalogs were great. My mom called them "wishbooks" when I was a kid. Turns out that was what sears called theres which honestly seems like a brilliant piece of marketing, but she called them all that, like calling all soft drinks coca cola lol. Magazines in general were nice. I love the gloss on the photos. The pages would shine like diamonds sometimes if they caught the light right I miss the Argos catalogue so much for this, especially for Christmas gift-shopping
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Nov 23, 2022 17:31
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJRqUvGeGXo
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Nov 23, 2022 17:53
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Milo and POTUS posted:Yeah catalogs were great. My mom called them "wishbooks" when I was a kid. Turns out that was what sears called theres which honestly seems like a brilliant piece of marketing,
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Nov 23, 2022 17:58
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Orange Julius
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Nov 23, 2022 18:20
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Borders. When I was a kid in the late 90's I stole all my porn from there.
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Nov 23, 2022 19:34
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WaldenSoftware loved buying PC games based on how heavy the box was - if it had a big manual, it had to be a good game!! copying games, selling them at school, then returning the original for cash with an excuse of "I dunno, it just didn't work on my IBM PC XT" never got old isaboo fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Nov 23, 2022 |
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Nov 23, 2022 19:35
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Suspekt Device posted:Borders. When I was a kid in the late 90's I stole all my porn from there. What Border's had porn.
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Nov 23, 2022 21:23
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Strange Cares posted:There used to be a great little tea shop called Tealuxe in Harvard Square with this weird little copper tables and a pretty good selection of tea. It was super cozy and I spent a lot of time there over the years, even though they didn't have a bathroom so you'd have to go down the street to piss . It will be a 5 story building, 30% retail and 70% office. I can't imagine any of the current tenants will remain/return to the new building, construction is supposed to take 18 months and I can't imagine they'll be charging less rent than before. Harvard Square has been a shadow of itself for a long time already, and soon it won't even be that anymore. Agreeing with others on missing the variety malls used to have. In the 90s a nearby mall had this store called Boomers, and I still can't find a good way to describe it. Just...cool stuff? It had like 6-8 small themed sections of merchandise. One corner was jungle themed, all sorts of plush jungle animals, toys, bric-a-brac, whatever, all themed with fake tree trunks and leafy decor. Go to the back and it was vaguely space themed, full of blacklight poo poo, lumenglass, plasma spheres, and a whole goddamn wall of that freeze dried astronaut ice cream. Another part was all pranks and novelties. Really wacky place, extremely powerful 90s energy, and always overstaffed with college-aged stoners (and there was always at least one employee walking around playing with devil sticks).
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Nov 23, 2022 22:51
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BAGS FLY AT NOON posted:There was a at least one in either Massachusetts or Connecticut. I was very young but I remember I liked pushing the big Z on the door. We had Zayre in Lowell and elsewhere but they became Ames and then closed.
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Nov 24, 2022 03:07
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The blue plate special wasn;t very good. But did you descend into the basement. No, the other basement.
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Nov 24, 2022 03:29
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No. 6 posted:Truly the gooniest post live in michigan for a year and then say that to my face, fucker
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Nov 24, 2022 03:47
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Doc Fission posted:Also not really a chain but I wish there were more small used bookstores in my city. There are a couple but I feel as though they were a lot more ubiquitous when I was a kid. This is probably just nostalgia though You're not imagining it. There used to be way more secondhand bookstores. I guess ebooks, eBay and Amazon etc. drove them out of business.
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Nov 24, 2022 04:20
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i miss the old adult book store. one time i put a teachers buisness card on the swingers board
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Nov 24, 2022 12:57
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I mean, stores for used and secondhand things in general are just a thing of the past. The overhead of paying rent for a showroom for old stuff, and hire staff to sell it, in a society where new stuff is prioritized means they just can't sell enough to drive interest to make the overhead worth it. You know one of these places is dying once you see the selection of newish gimmick crap start showing up by the registers. Selling online, you can store this poo poo in any garage or storage unit and don't need to pay someone to be around to serve customers all day.
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Nov 24, 2022 14:40
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Thinkin' bout how weird and dumb the eBay store from The 40 Year Old Virgin was. That was absolutely just a plot macguffin, there's no way anyone ever actually had a real store like that.
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Nov 24, 2022 14:50
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There was an eBay store thing where I lived when that movie came out. It was real and supposedly for old people.
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Nov 24, 2022 15:07
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StrangersInTheNight posted:Thinkin' bout how weird and dumb the eBay store from The 40 Year Old Virgin was. That was absolutely just a plot macguffin, there's no way anyone ever actually had a real store like that. i like how the guy wanted to buy those boots
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Nov 24, 2022 15:15
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Neighborhoods Dairy outside Amherst MA Still operates but totally different management and completely different store than when I worked there.
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Nov 24, 2022 15:19
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As far as Fry’s goes, I used to go there when it was one store in Sunnyvale, a big tilt up with no interesting anything, architecturally. I bought my first PC there, a Leading Edge 486sx(the crappy one, hey, but it’s a FOUR EIGHTY SIX)with not enough memory and no sound card or modem, I think it was $1700. I had to install a modem and sound card myself, inspiring a hatred of IRQ’s that continues to this day. That Fry’s was so loving packed all the time, it was incredible. Then one day it moved across the street to a new, cooler building that was like 4X the size. I spent so much time there in the mid-late Nineties buying computer crap I didn’t need. Fry’s opened everywhere - Fremont, Cambell(the famous pyramid one with the long staircase in the front), North San Jose, Palo Alto, everywhere, and they were always packed. I’d have a cart filled with stuff(Mavica digital camera! Voodoo 3500 with TV! 4 gig hard drive! A decent CPU paired with shittiest Biostar or ECS motherboard imaginable - but the mobo is basically FREE!) and would take me 35 minutes in line to slowly meander past the enormous candy and impulse item display, even though there’d be 24 checkers running at the time. Then, at some point, the number of checkout clerks dwindled. There would still be a line, but nothing like the old days, but the merchandise was still ok. Until it wasn’t, and the death-spiral went on far longer than it should have. RIP, you magnificent bastard of a retail establishment, the likes of you will never be seen again.
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Nov 24, 2022 15:35
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Here in Canada, we still have Chapters bookstores, but I miss how they were laid out in the late 90s and early 2000s. They were more focused on selling books than knick-knacks and toys, so comfortable reading nooks were placed throughout the stores. Very comfy. I would look forward to visiting Chapters as a kid. Nowadays, the stores are designed to show off merchandise in elaborate displays and get people in and out as quickly as possible. Consequently, it feels like less of a place you want to visit.
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Nov 24, 2022 16:15
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StrangersInTheNight posted:I mean, stores for used and secondhand things in general are just a thing of the past. The overhead of paying rent for a showroom for old stuff, and hire staff to sell it, in a society where new stuff is prioritized means they just can't sell enough to drive interest to make the overhead worth it. You know one of these places is dying once you see the selection of newish gimmick crap start showing up by the registers. Selling online, you can store this poo poo in any garage or storage unit and don't need to pay someone to be around to serve customers all day. This is objectively false. With the rising prices of everything, secondhand stores have become more common and popular. Just in my small town alone, we had two thrift stores open across the street from each other in the past year, and they are both thriving due to the high demand for cheaper goods. On top of that, all my local speciality shops (e.g., comics, video games, movies) thrive mostly off people trading in old merch.
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Nov 24, 2022 16:18
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Dr.D-O posted:This is objectively false. With the rising prices of everything, secondhand stores have become more common and popular. Yeah, there's a great family owned franchise thing called Half-price Books that feels more like a normal book store than a thrift shop. They pay very little for stuff, but that's to be expected; dropping off a bag of books to get shelf space back and getting 10 bucks for them that you spend right at the store buying more books seems to be a model that works for them. They have comic books, vinyl, board games etc in addition to lots of books. I like never knowing what I'll find there and that's an experience that's a lot harder to find online; there's something about the chance of discovery that I can't really find on Amazon where I can search for any book in existence or be served up things an algorithm decided I'd like based on previous buying habits.
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Nov 24, 2022 18:07
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well lucky you living in a place where things work and it isn't being gentrified so thoroughly any place that would be able to be a secondhand store is turned into empty condos by hawkish venture capitalists. I am legit jelly. of course Half Price Books exists, they're like - the big branded version of secondhand stores. they're managing to last bc they're a chain. And I love them but wish it was more than just them and a handful of the good but scattered thrift stores I've memorized. Since this is the thread for it, RIP to the local Buffalo Exchange, best place to sell my used clothes, pushed out due to high rent. Rag-o-rama and Plato's Closet can eat my dick, they buy back like nothing. StrangersInTheNight fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Nov 24, 2022 |
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Nov 24, 2022 18:08
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Half priced books fan, especially after my PS4 controller conked out and they had a refurbished one for $20 that has been working great. Always fun to browse their used board games as they have high turnover and lots of oddities.
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Nov 24, 2022 18:19
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Waldenbooks always smelled like bread cause it was next door to a bakery in the Hillsborough mall
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Nov 24, 2022 19:52
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I haven't seen mention of Shopko They had a ridiculous no-questions-asked, unlimited-time return policy. I knew the guy who was the general manager of the Shopko in my hometown and he'd tell stories of people bringing in like a tent they bought 8 years ago and have been using ever since just walking in with it and getting a full refund for the original price even though it was obviously used and beat to pieces from years of use.
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Nov 24, 2022 19:58
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I'm sure it's been posted in here, but I miss the arcades that had actual video games in them. I'm not talking about Dave and Busters poo poo that's 70% redemption games. I'm talking actual honest to god dark, weird smelling arcades. Places that had cabinets from all decades of gaming. The noise is just a cacophony of beeps and boops along with the clanging noise of the change machine dispensing quarters.
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Nov 24, 2022 21:25
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Jose Oquendo posted:I'm sure it's been posted in here, but I miss the arcades that had actual video games in them. I'm not talking about Dave and Busters poo poo that's 70% redemption games. I'm talking actual honest to god dark, weird smelling arcades. Places that had cabinets from all decades of gaming. The noise is just a cacophony of beeps and boops along with the clanging noise of the change machine dispensing quarters. Yup, all gone. A lot of them had console ports but before PSX/N64 came out it was shocking just how much worse they looked from their cabinet counterparts.
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Nov 24, 2022 21:52
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Arcades having a bunch of pinball machines. I remember it being common for arcades to have at least four, now you will be lucky if they have one traditional pinball machine. They probably won't have any.
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Nov 24, 2022 22:33
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