There’s still one Spencer’s gifts left in my city.

We also just recently got papa John’s but I’m too conflicted to try it

Yup, they deliberately ran it into the ground. They took out loans against Kmart to buy Sears and sold Sears and Kmart properties off to give themselves money via stock buybacks.

And what’s worse, because it worked, you can see similar actions happening to other major retail outlets. Target, in particular, seems to be following directly in the footsteps of Kmart.

I still won’t forgive Shopko for consuming Pamida and ultimately taking the remnants of Pamida down with it.

I’m surprised to see on Wikipedia that Shopko actually owned Pamida basically the entire time I was growing up, they just ran it independently. They even broke up breifly before re-merging later. The second merger sent it all to shit, though. “Shopko Hometown” my ass.

Shopko

Memory triggered. There was a Shopko in Nebraska near where my grandfather lived. I remember buying Super Metroid, Secret of Mana, and Mega Man Soccer there in 1994. Well, at least two of the games were great!

End stage Fry’s was so weird it could have been a Terry Gilliam movie or something. Vast expanses of mostly empty aisles with the few bits of leftover inventory still there, but interspersed with filled-up cages of AliExpress junk at 10x the AE price or 3x the “get it tomorrow” Amazon price. Then there would be one or two areas where the vendors had gone along with their cockamamie “we’ll sell your shit on consignment!” scam, and a few sad employees trying to avoid making eye contact.

Yet Microcenter endures.

“Let me put it this way. A corporation is like a big, hungry monster. My job is to find plenty of smaller, weaker monsters for it to eat.”