Five stores long gone I wish were still around

There are a few retail stores that come and go and nobody bats an eye. I will never miss walking into an over priced Sam Goody or a ratty old Blockbuster video. While I understand business is tough and new stores come, and go, all the time there are a few that have fallen into the memories of those from yesteryear that could really use a come back. Here is a list of the five retailers I miss the most.

1.  Kmart

Yeah I know a lot of people like to crap on Kmart but most of those people are short sighted and only remember what the store devolved into in its final years. However before the downfall Kmart was the it place, especially for those on a tighter budget. Not just because they had a surprising good variety back in their heyday but they also had damn good deals. If it wasn’t the Blue Light Special or the Price Matching their competition it was their lay a way program that really make it worth it. For a small weekly payment you could set aside a full shopping cart of dope stuff and just pay it off little by little. When Target and Walmart got rid of Layaway I dug my heels and and basically became a die hard Kmart loyalist until the very end. 

2. Radio Shack

Again I won’t cry any tears for losing what it became near the end but I have nothing but warm fuzzies when I remember how awesome it was back in the day. Back in the 90s, before the rise of Best Buy Radio Shack was the place to get electronics. I don’t just mean VCRs and computers but I mean components, wires, cables even transistors and things of the like. No matter what you wanted to do with home audio, home theater or video games you could find the tools you needed at Radio Shack. Once upon a time they actually hired knowledgeable reps who actually knew their stuff. If you had a question about electronics they had an answer. 

3. Hastings

I have ranted about this before and I will bring it up again and again but there has never been a store like Hastings was, again, before the downfall. Back in the 90s it was THE best video rental store, but it was also THE best used CD store, comic book shop, music instrument store, action figure and collectible store and so much more. Then the higher ups decided to close down the mega stores and move them into malls then they transformed them into crowded Hot Topic clones. Of course that was the end of them as a company but man in the old days they were the place to be. 

4. Kings

This one is older and more obscure. They had their heyday before I was born but there were a few stragglers limping along well into the late 2010s. They were like an inbetween a Dollar General and a Kmart. Not as big or varied as a full Kmart but bigger and better quality stuff than a dollar store. What was their strong point was how they bought their products from over crowded warehouses which often gave them access to products that other stores had clearanced and moved on. You could walk into a Kings in the early 2000s and find action figures and video games that were sitting on selves since the late 80s! I could regularly buy vintage, sealed, Star Wars, He-man or even Transformers toys that had long been out of stock and relegated to ebay. It was a magical time capsule that I will miss for many more years. 

5. K B Toys

I know most hipsters online will cry and scream about Toys R Us but the truth is those giant box stores only existed in big cities whereas KB was everywhere else. If you lived in a smaller city with a decent sized shopping mall chances are you had a KB instead of a Toys R Us. KB was smaller and higher priced then the department stores but they made up for it in variety. While Kmart, Walmart and the like would have the popular figures in a toy line or the mainstream best selling video games, KB had the lesser known stuff. While you could get Bumble Bee or Duke at any box store that sold toys, if you wanted a lesser known Transformer like Skullgrin or a Ninja Turtle like Panda Kahn that the big stores got in limited quantities, KB would have a whole shelf of them. Same for video games. Yeah if you wanted Sonic, Mario or Mortal Kombat you went to Walmart. But if you wanted to find something lesser known like Musha or Demon’s Crest you turned to KB toys. They had everything. I was more than willing to pay a few extra bucks to save myself the trouble of driving 3 hours to the Giraffe store.