Stores you miss walking around in, or, the retail nostalgia thread

Not sure if it was an international chain but we used to have a store in our local mall called The It Store, they sold gag gifts and erotic jokey type stuff, it was fun to look around in as a kid. I remeber they always had those snake things that would slip out of your hands when you tried to hang onto it. It was basically Spencer's Gifts.
 
The good guys. It felt like the future in there. They had a neo geo and 3do on display on a 27 inch tv. Felt so damn high tech and expensive.
 
Back when I was a child, the Hills department store in my city was almost a magical experience. They always set up the most elaborate toy displays behind glass. ❤

 
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I used to take dates to Spencer's just to see how they'd react to seeing dildos and stuff. Gave me a pretty good idea of if I was going to score or not.
 
Blockbuster and Future Shop. I don't like Best Buy nearly as much.
 
Local toy store, quite big. Staring at the model train sets and small steam engine kits for hours. How exciting.
 
I loved wandering around Budget sampling music when i was little. Then they just all disappeared. I thought they went out of business. So imagine my surprise when in 2017, driving through Minot ND of all places, i saw one.


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Can bet your bollocks to a barn dance that i stopped and went inside. It was exactly as i remembered. I felt like i had wandered through a time slip and went to the past. I ended up buying a Lindsey Stirling CD.

I also enjoyed Suncoast for all their obscure movies. And Best Buy when they used to stock a dozen rows of movies or so. Well, they did at my formally local one anyway.

I'd also list videogame arcades but after moving to the Twin Cities, that is NOT a problem anymore. Granted, i can't find specific games sometimes, but new ones open all the time.
 
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Toys R Us for me. When we went to the US for the first time on a holiday, I was blown away by the sizes of those stores and wanted to visit every single one of them we found on the side of whatever highway.

Good times. I also miss a proper mall in general, as we simply do not have those here (yet).
 
Montgomery Ward. When I was a kid, it was the place to get goddamn everything short of food.

Paasei said:
Toys R Us for me.
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Same. The one in my town was always low on staff, so you couldn't always find people when you needed help. The net effect is there was an entire half of the store that was completely devoid of human life. And it was positioned in such a way that the tall warehouse shelves blocked out a lot of the light and music. Like the far back wall where all the LEGOs were was a silent, deserted nightmare hallway of colored boxes. The same effect caused echoes to come from the isle with all the model cars, where all the grandparents would gather while the kids were elsewhere. And then there was the Barbie doll isle, which had it's own, eye level lights, so it shown through the darkness like a pink portal to the unicorn dimension.
 
Soon every damn store will be in this thread - we're driving them out of business and all we'll have is Amazon.
 
I feel stores haven't changed enough for me to really miss them. Most all feel exactly the same.

I guess something I do miss, as mentioned, is the rental stores. They had such a good vibe, because whether you were watching a movie or getting a game, the whole thing felt like a prelude to an awesome night.
 
At my local video store pre-internet days when I was a youngin' used to get hyped cuz they had a dirty video section behind curtains. Never entered the section, but it had a very mysterious aura !
 
Toys R Us, Barnes & Noble, and EB - I guess Gamestop is still around, but yeah, not the same.

Also used to enjoy walking around Home Depot as a teenager with my friends for some inexplicable reason, as I'm not and never have been a DIY guy. I suppose it was the smell of sawdust and paint. It's still kind of enjoyable as an adult in the off-chance that I have to shop at one.
 
There was a mom and pop video game rental store in my hometown that I have fond memories of. It was in an old house that had been gutted, so it was just one big room with shelf after shelf of games. It was much better than Blockbuster because it had tons of RPGs and relatively obscure NES games for rent.
 
Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble of course.

There's still a B&N bout 25 minutes away from me but there used to be one right by my house that shut down a decade ago.

Toys 'R Us and K.B Toys as well.

And Tower Records was the shit.
 
I can't find a decent photo of the store, but in my town, Swindon (located in south west England) during the 90s there used to be this amazing toy and model store called Beaties.

I did however find this great picture of the VR unit they had in the store during the early 90s.

Look at this thing! It was worth going to the store just to get a taste of the future.

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All stores are open here, so I'll have to modify your prompt a bit.. stores in countries i no longer live in.. cvs pharmacy; whole foods
 
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Used to love roaming through toy stores back in the day (80s).
Stuffed with M.A.S.K., transformers, lego, nintendo, sega. It was glorious.

Now when I walk through one, it's... different.

Who remembers this:

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i miss hanging out by the magazines/books while my mom would do the grocery shopping

i would go straight for nintendo power and any other game magazine. sometimes id pick u a fantasy novel and read the first 5 pages.
 
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