The Famed Dominick's Arch, 1971

Welcome to those who have come here by way of Eric Zorn’s Chicago Tribune column today. This website is a tribute to retail chain stores of the past – mainly supermarkets and discount stores, with a few others (department stores, toy stores, etc.) thrown in just for fun. Some chains are gone altogether. For the ones that remain of course, the stores look radically different today.My name is Dave,

The Original Big K

Well, Big K, we hardly knew ye, and now you’re leaving us again. That’s right, the many Kmart stores which for some not well-explained reason took on the “Big K Mart” identity in the mid-90’s are being restored (thankfully) back to just “Kmart”, with a logo closer to their original 1960’s look, albeit with a single color, red. And a familiar sight to many Kroger shoppers is their age-old “Big K”

Wal-Mart Expands the "Magic Circle"

If Sam Walton harbored dreams of empire during Wal-Mart’s early years, he did a good job of keeping it to himself. That’s not to say he wasn’t interested in growth – he most certainly was, as is clearly evidenced throughout his autobiography. In Wal-Mart’s first decade and beyond though, the company flew under the radar, expanding slowly within the area that Walton called the “magic circle” –

Influencing Wal-Mart

The one aspect of the Wal-Mart story that I find most fascinating was Sam Walton’s study of the discount store industry, in the years both before and after the launch of his namesake chain. In his autobiography, Walton describes his adventures visiting discount stores all over America. “I ran the country, studying the discounting concept, visiting every store and company headquarters I could

What Sam Walton Knew

For many years following World War II, the most famous individual in American retail was arguably James Cash Penney. Founder of the famous chain that bore his name, Mr. Penney was active in the company into his nineties, passing away at age 95 in 1971. In 1950, he published a best-selling autobiography, Fifty Years with the Golden Rule, which shed light on his life, Christian faith, and

A New Logo for Wal-Mart!

I don’t make a habit of reacting to current retail news on this site, but over the last week or so, it’s been hard to escape the coverage of Wal-Mart’s (er, excuse me, Walmart’s) new logo. The storefront in this 1977 photo shows the “frontier” style logo the company used until the early 1980’s. By the time most Americans became familiar with Walmart, it had been phased out for some years.Opinions

Last Spin of the Turn-Style

The mid/late-1970’s proved to be the Waterloo of a number of discount retail chains with a significant presence in Chicago. The late George Lazarus, longtime business writer for the Chicago Tribune, listed the recent casualties in a 1978 editorial – Topps (Interstate Stores), Korvettes, W.T. Grant and Robert Hall Village. In short order, Jewel-owned Turn-Style would be added to the list.

Happy (Day After) the 4th of July!

Hope that everyone had a great Independence Day! Now that the parades and fireworks are over, some of you may be tackling household projects today, like painting. And there’s no better place to buy the paint than…do I even have to say it?Today marks the one-year anniversary of Pleasant Family Shopping. (This website, that is, not the actual practice itself.) Thanks so much to everyone for your

Turn-Stylin'

After moving to quickly establish the first new Turnstyle West (technically it was the midwest) region stores upon buying out the company in 1962, Jewel proceeded much more slowly through the rest of the sixties. Having opened the Racine, Skokie and Harlem-Foster stores, two more Turnstyles would open in 1963, both of them in the Quad Cities – Moline, Illinois in May and Davenport, Iowa, in