Let’s Pour One Out for Discount Department Stores
Why we should mourn the passing of this once ubiquitous retail category.
There’s a picture of my Dad from the mid-1970s where he is standing at the counter of a store. I don’t know who took it, but since it was a Polaroid and those were the going camera at the time, my guess it was a store clerk. The picture is significant not just because it’s an image of my father who died in 2015, but where it was taken: at a discount department store.
When I look at the photo, it looks like it was taken at the Woolco store near my childhood home in Flint, Michigan. Woolco was Woolworth’s hipper brother and the chain dotted the Midwest in the 60s and 70s until the chain went out of business in the mid-80s. When we think of discount retailers today, we tend to think of two: Target and Walmart. Those two were the survivors of a certain breed of American retail that is all but extinct these days: discount department stores.
I was reminded again of the demise of this category of retail from a recent article by urbanist Addison Del Mastro where he visits Roses discount store, a regional chain that still survives.
When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, you might see an ad for some product that end with a graphic tailor-made for the region where you lived…
