Observation about "What Do You Miss?"

[veg-o-matic]

Well, I was rereading the "What Do You Miss" thread and noticed something I hadn't when I read it piecemeal.

There were a few common threads throughout--food, family, little rituals, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary.

What surprised me was the number of times Sears was mentioned.

Oh, I had good times at Sears, too--looking at the washing machines and the TVs (especially the consoles), the sewing machines and vacuums. "The Big Toy Box" at Christmastime. And the day the Wish Book came in the mail... I still have a bunch of old ones, some with initials and items circled. Ah, to be that young again.

And Sears' candy department had the best double-dipped peanuts in the world. 'Member when they had a whole section of candy in the Wish Book?

And actual salespeople? I remember the vacuum department turned Hoover's "Beats as it sweeps as it cleans" into "Beats, brushes, and sucks." Not as fluid, maybe, but to the point! They'd always have samples of different kinds of carpets and would put this fluffy kind of lint on it to demonstrate the vacuums.

Ooooh. Did anyone else wear "Toughskins"? In "Husky" sizes?

One more little weird memory about Sears before I go. I couldn't have been more than 7 or so, but I still remember the time some wisenheimer put a mannequin head on top of one of the agitators and there it was, going back and forth. Creeped me out, and it still does.

veg

 

[deeptub]

I miss Sears. There used to be a free-standing Sears in downtown Waukegan. We always parked such that we had to go through the appliance department to get anywhere else. Whether mom and dad did this to appease me or if it was just convenient traffic-wise, I don't know. Somewhere in the early 1980s they closed that store and the next nearest Sears (a gigantic one in a gigantic mall) was about 15 miles away.

Up until very recently my mom and dad still had their half-height no-magnetic-strip Sears charge plates from when they opened their account in 1971. They finally told mom she needed to call the 800 number and get new cards. So she did. Since their account dated back to 1971, mom and dad's new cards still both had dad's name on them, and mom had signed hers Mrs. George Shea. So a few months ago, after finally finding a register that was open (two departments away from where she was shopping), mom went to pay with her Sears card (because there was extra % off when you put it on your sears account), and the clerk told mom that since her name wasn't on the card, unless she had a note from my father giving her permission to use it, she couldn't accept it. Mom said, "His PERMISSION!? I'M the one who pays the bill every month!" But of course the shopgirl didn't care--new policy and she had to follow it. Of course this is going on in front of other customers and mom was more humiliated than mad and just pulled out her MasterCard which DID have her own name on it and got the hell out of there. And has since vowed to never return. Of course this girl could have run the transaction and alerted mom to the new policy and that in the future she'd need a card with her own name on it.

And department stores wonder why they can't draw customers and turn a profit. How many customers get mistreated once, and because they have so many other stores they can go to, never return?

HMPH.
T.

P.S. Though I miss the way Sears used to be, I don't miss my Toughskins. Or my JCPenney Superdenim and Supercords. Ech.

 

[dalangdon]

Sears/Credit Cards

I have babbled many times on here about how I liked Sears. The downtown Seattle Sears is the oldest continuously operating Sears store and, while a shadow of it's former self, is still fun to shop at.

But now - onto Credit Cards...

I have a love/hate relationship with Sears credit. It's finally paid off and retired now, but I had a hefty balance with them for quite some time. Since they were the only ones who gave me credit at first, I guess I have to give them credit for that ;-)

There used to be a department store in Omaha called Kilpatricks that my mom favored. When it was purchased by Younkers (another midwestern chain) the called it younker-Kilpatricks, and she was able to hang onto her Kilpatrick's card until the put the magnetic strip on the cards - at which time they dropped the Kilpatrick's part of the name, and she had to accept the new card.

Younker also bought Brandeis (the other big chain in town) and dropped that name right away. I think that they, in turn have been gobbled up by Saks.

There's also a midwestn chain called Dillards that is in town now. After my dad died my mom went into Dillards to buy some pantyhose or something. When she went to charge it the salesgirl told her that since her husband had died, she would have to reapply for a new card. I was much more offended than my mom was by that: They had had the card forever, had always paid their balance, and the card was in both their names. What was weird was that we couldn't figure out how they knew - he died on a Thursday, and this was only Sunday. I wrote an email to Dillards to complain, and they replied that (basically) the credit card was issued by some third party, and they didn't care that I was upset. I always thought they were tacky trashy stores anyway - that confirmed it for me. From now on, we shop at Von Maur ;-)

 

[deeptub]

I can't speak for the chain, but the Dillard's a few towns over is trashy. I won't set foot in it. It's this odd small southern Illinois town that collectively has a Napoleon complex or paranoid personality disorder or something, and the Dillards and the people who work there are the retail expression of said complex. Creepy.

 

[drmitch]

Veg, I also loved the candy. It was the first thing my dad and I would head for when entering Sears.

 

[goatfarmer]

When we shopped downtown South Bend,we always parked in Sears lot,walked in,walked through the store,then walked out the other side and continued on down to JC Penny's,Robertsons,Kresge's,etc. Sears had free parking,and my mom wanted the Sears people to think she actually shopped there.I don't remember much about the store,except the key shop was located under the escalator to the second level.And the smell of carmelcorn.....

kennyGF

 

[maytagbear]

We were not really Sears

people, we were Montgomery Wards people, but just for some things.

In the Akron area, MW had more of a presence in the early 60's-mid 70s.

For appliances, we always went to a Mom and Pop appliance dealer, and still feel that it's the best way. (No offence meant to any Applianceville residents who are employed by a big box store).

I miss the true Cleveland department stores, like The Higbee Company. Higbee's is now Dillards, or as I like to call them, DULLARDS.

What isn't Wal*Mart is Macy's, and what isn't Macy's is Dullards (almost!)

What I REALLY, REALLY miss are department stores that you could make a day out of. A cup of coffee and a muffin at the lunch room, then the book and stationery department, a hair cut, a lovely chicken salad plate at the lunch room, then on to linens, then to records, and finally, housewares..and have it all delivered, or brought out to the car....

(Or when near Nordstrom level service was the general rule, than the delightful exception.)

Lawrence/Maytagbear

 

[petek]

Dan.. what street or corner is the Sears in downtown Seattle on? For the life of me I cannot remember there being a Sears downtown store only the golden triangle 3, Bon, Nordstrom and the F&N boutique. We would go perhaps once a month or at least once every two months on a Saturday morning for 10 years and I never saw it and figured I knew my way around as well as anyone. And no I wasn't drunk or hungover,, that always took place on the Saturday night if we were heading to Seattle, I would stay home knit and read the good book on a Friday night preceding debauchery. HA

 

[hoover1060]

A very vivid Sears memory...

Growing up in the Chicago burbs, we didn't have a Sears really close, the nearest one when I was a small child would have been at The Oakbrook Center mall. We also had a Sears catalog/appliance store in Itasca that we went to quite often as my mother ordered from the catalog alot. The Woodfield Mall store opened in 1971, and since then its been the family's Sears.
I was always fascinated by Kenmore vacuums, they were so different than the Hoovers I knew. I can still remember just itching to go by the vacuums, as at Sears the vacuums RAN, and I would watch the demos.
I remember once running up to the vacuums and on the corner of the display was a Duo-Power upright, the original style with the switch on the back of the handle. Since I regularly flipped Hoover switches, why not Sears, but this time the vacuum roared to life! Worse, it was a two speed machine, and in my haste to turn it off missed the middle off position and went right to the upper speed.
My mother, pushing my sister in a stroller, caught me, and dragged me away by the ear, pushing the stroller with her free hand til we could find my dad.
A few years ago I found a Duo Power upright to the one I had seen at Sears, and I dragged up that memory in a conversation with my parents. Mom didn't remember it, but dad did. I'll never forget it!
Be it Sears, Wards, Penneys, or Kmart, if I wandered off they knew where to find me.

 

[petek]

I think my favorite dept when I was small was the TV's especially the color tv's because that was still the time most people didn't have one in the very early 60's. I always liked those little "miniature display tents" Sears had in the sporting goods dept as well. Then over in the bedding/mattress they'd have those pillow sized display mattresses with the vinyl window in them to see the springs inside.. I didn't know they were to display the mattresses inside and thought they were pillows and why would anyone want a hard pillow like that LOL.
The other Sears memory I have is when we'd go in the evening with both my mom and dad, it was probably always a Thursday or Friday evening because back then they weren't open late every night or at all on Sunday. Anways,,at about 730 or 8 pm my dad would be rushing us out so he could get home and watch Get Smart.

 

[Kevinpreston3]

Our May D & F in Denver was like an...

upscale Sears.

I loved it. There was the Sears-type candy counter (really a square) on the lower floor. Bridge mix, chocolate covered peanuts and raisins, orange slices (gumdrop) in clear plastic bins and ladies in white serving you. Was it the same company that was in Sears stores as I mentioned on another thread? Not sure!

Upstairs there was a nice restaurant. My mom would take me shopping and always bought lunch there. Across from the restaurant was the toy deparment, and housewares.

I remember in the kids shoe department downstairs, for the longest time, they had it as a space theme. This was during the moon launches when everything was space. It was a little wooded structure you walked up to and went inside curtains. There was a console that had buttons, and when you pushed them, different pictures lit up of rockets. There was a throttle control that when you pushed it, there was a roar...I think someone had hooked it up to a vacuum cleaner. I have never seen a display like it since.

You could get all your school clothes there and more. It was a nice memory. When I went back to Denver, that May D and F, and in fact the whole mini mall it was on, was leveled and a new structure built in its place. Sadly, it is all big stores like Home Depot. It was called Bear Valley, and had the May D & F, Orange Julius, Baskin Robins, Wyatt's Cafeteria (not bad but not quite as good as Furrs) and all sorts of stores.

Right outside May, there was this really bizarre "sculpture". Imagine a circle of strings, about an inch apart, that stretched to the ceiling. There were three sets of these "string towers". Oil or some such clear liquid oozed down these strings into a base of rocks. Somehow, this fluid was then pumped back up to the top to slowly work its way down the strings. It was fascinating.

Right next to that, the mall candy store parked a car with the "taffy guy", a wooded guy that was attached to a crank that yanked around taffy. So cool.

 

[petek]

The Sears candy counter was called Pauline Kellogg or Peggy Kellogg IIRC.

 

[tomturbomatic]

As a child, I was not dragged to Sears all that much. I remember the Sears in Ottawa, Illinois, or more specifically the appliance and plumbing departments, before we moved to the Atlanta area. Then in 1958 we went to the big store on Ponce de Leon Ave. and bought the washer. We went there a couple of more times. We bought the water heater, looked at dishwashers and I bought dad's neat round hibachi there but it was not our department store for frequent shopping and then suddenly, I could drive and go where I wanted. A friend told me that since the huge regional warehouse was part of the store's operations, you paid no shipping on catalog sales if you picked them up there. I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember this, but in the Men's section of the 1968 Sears catalog, at the end of the underwear section, there were some additional offerings on the plain brown and white pages and it was there that I first found bikini briefs! They were stretch nylon, and not the most comfortable in hot weather, but they were hot in their own way and could only be ordered through the catalog so that's how I got started with the catalog. When I would receive a catalog sale booklet, I would order stuff, mostly their Best Men's Goldcup knock off socks, and pick it up on the trip from school. The really big draw, however, was that also downstairs was the Sears clearance center. You could find neat things down there including rebuilt combos that they had taken back and actually "worked on" and were trying to sell again. I saw the models with the little rectangular red light between the door and the lower panel that said "UNBALANCED." At least it did not light up when I approached. Those were the ones where the off balance switch did not automatically reset. You had to open the lower panel and pull this rip cord with a ring at the end to restart the machine. I have never seen a situation where a 29" combo got so seriously OOB that it did not at least do the slow spin, but who knows? These were all the older combos, more like John's in Beltsville with the flush white plastic on the left-hand side of the control panel and blue and black lettering and markings on the buttons and dial. At that time they were still selling combos and I did not have any place to store another. My parents, especially my father, begrudged the 6.5 to 7.0 square feet of space that Brenda later occupied in our basement. Then there were no combos in the clearance area and then no combos for sale upstairs. And, for part of that time, I had my Duomatic connected at a friend's house and I knew that it was the only successful combo so I was not too anxious to invest money I needed for other things in something I not only could not use, but also could not house. OY! The regret over lost opportunities. OK, I'm better now.

We eventually got a Sears in a mall near our house. It even had turtleneck shirts for sale in some fake-British named part of the Men's Dept., but by then the magic of the Big Sears Store and having to beg permission to look at the appliances was gone and the only Kenmore appliance that interested me was the combo. I went into the appliance dept and wrote down the model and serial number of one of the LKs and went to the parts department and ordered the manual & parts list. It was 14 or 15 years before I met John and Jeff and finally got my own private combo with a custom water valve and hidden switches so that I could also have medium wash water and my choice of cool in addition to warm or cold rinses. WOWEE ZOWEE

 

[veg-o-matic]

We were a Sears family for appliances and electronics. My parents always said that if you bought from Sears, you didn't have to worry about finding service. From them we got: fridge, two washers, dishwasher, two TVs (including our first color), two record players, two air conditioners, dryer, and heaven only knows whatall else.

Kenny: Did your Sears have caramel corn? I don't remember ever smelling it at Sears, but to this day, when I think of Wards I smell caramel corn.

Lawrence: Please don't tell me that the Higbee's from "A Christmas Story" is anything but Higbee's!

Kevin: That "sculpture" sounds suspiciously like those lamps from the 70's. Remember: they generally had a cheesy Venus de Milo in the middle of a bunch of strings that "rained" mineral oil. And get this--they're back! I saw one in Wal Mart the other day. I keep threatening to get one for a friend of mine.

veg

 

[Kevinpreston3]

Sculpture

Veg, probably the same technology.

But here you have to remember that the circles were a good 2 foot in diameter, going up to a ceiling that was at least two stories tall. I think they had colored floods on them also. It predated the "psychodelic" period really, and I don't mean to infer that flavor to it. I think closer to 1963 was when it was made.

Funny, back then I thought it was cool but nothing particularly special. One talks about it now and thinks, geez, that was wierd.

 

[petek]

Veg.. all proper Italian families had those lamps!!!

 

[dalangdon]

We had a Sears in downtown Council Bluffs, which was a nice enough store (all of downtown Council Bluffs was nice in those days before a sleazy banker sold the gullible townspeople on a horrible "urban renewal" mall scheme and abruptly left town. The mall died shortly thereafter) but the "Glamourous" Sears was in Omaha at the Crossroads Mall. It's still there, but I suspect it's been altered significantly.

On the other end of that Mall was the aforementioned Brandeis. They had a big downtown store, but the Crossroads store had an atrium between the escalators that had this huge sculpture/fountain that came down from the ceiling. The candy counter was at the bottom of it, and they sold these great toasted marshmellows. They also had a restaurant called "The Chuck Wagon" or something like that with a western theme.

The downtown Brandeis had a cafeteria, a HUGE lunch counter, a "tearoom" (their name, not mine ;-) and a hot dog stand. They also had tunnels that connected them to Penneys, Woolworths, the Brandeis drug store, and the Medical Arts building. It was quite a complex.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Off beat lamps

Did anyone have a Castro's Convertibles open near them in the mid to late 60s? All of their lamps had a gimick, usually involving pumped water or the dripping oil. Some had turning water wheels; some were just fountains, but they had movement and noise and were often monstrosities.

 

[dalangdon]

For Pete

The downtown Seattle Sears is (strictly speaking) south of downtown, in what is now considered the "stadium district". The building is huge - most of it was the catalog distribution center, and is now the Starbucks headquarters.

Up until the early 90's, the front of the retail store was sheathed in turquoise metal, and had a huge neon "Sears" written in that 60's pseudo-handwriting font they used to use. The tower of the building (which was remarkably like the old Minneapolis Sears store) had "SEARS" on it in huge neon letters. It was quite the sight from I-5

I really miss Frederick & Nelson. Nordstrom destroyed the interior of that building for their remarkably bland new store. It's like looking at a favorite old aunt who got a bad plastic surgery job, a tacky die job, and is now trying to strut her stuff in a miniskirt.