Touchstone Pictures was a distribution label that Disney founded in the 80s that helped save the company.
They discontinued it about a decade ago. Great films that came from it include Lincoln, Splash, Ed Wood, Dick Tracy, Good Morning Vietnam, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Sister Act. They defined a lot of the 80s and 90s entertainment.
It is almost forgotten now.
Similarly, New Line Cinema was known for taking highly profitable risks like A Nightmare on Elm Street, TMNT and Lord of the Rings. They were bought by Warner in the '90s but continued to operate independently until the late 2000s, when The Golden Compass bombing led to Warner gutting them as an independent company.
RadioShack. Remember when you could walk in and get a battery or obscure cable? It was like a tech treasure chest, but now it’s just nostalgia in a digital age.
My dad graduated with an electrical engineering degree in the late '70s, but even well into the '90s I can still remember him packing up the family (including us tiny kids) to spend a solid half hour at Radio Shack every other weekend. He'd just be getting handfuls of little resistors and switches and bits of wires and stuff that I have no idea what it was for, but he could tinker with it on his projects.
And the staff there actually knew what the hell he was talking about and was able to work with him to figure out what things would work for his projects. The last time I went into one, which must have been mid '00s, the staff was all about selling phones and had no knowledge about electronics.
I don't even know if there is anywhere local that you can buy all those odds and ends now, I think I'd have to just order it online.
>And the staff there actually knew what the hell he was talking about
I noticed that at some point in the mid to late 90's, the workers at Radio Shack, Home Depot, Lowes, etc went from passionate subject matter experts to underpaid warm bodies
When people could make a living off the job, they did it because they enjoyed it. When people can't make a living off the job, they find something else.
When people who actually care about what they are doing for a living aren't respected they tend to move on, particularly when their salary is falling and their pension is being removed.
Watching a show like The Americans... they ran a travel agency. There used to be a travel agency in most moderately sized cities, supporting anywhere from 2-6 people or more. That's dozens of families in each state. Now, almost all the money goes to a few people that were fortunate enough to be alive during the earlier days of the internet (hotwire and whatever else, idk I'm too anxious to spend any money whatsoever to consider travelling). My mom was a single mother and raised us as a manager at a Samsonite luggage store at the mall. I'm sure Samsonite did well enough, and around the country in decent sized cities they supported a manager, a couple staff. I'd assume most of that goes to Amazon now, so 1 person can build his own space program. Probably supports some underpaid amazon warehouse workers and drivers
There used to be choices in smaller and mid sized cities... now in my city it's healthcare/state working at a group home, manager at a Dollar General who works 80 hrs a week, supermarkets (being treated like shit). So many jobs got consolidated into whoever was able to make a well known website and become a billionaire. And there's just more and more people every day
Speaking of Samsonite, it took me like 15 years after first watching Dumb and Dumber to realize that joke, and I started laughing because it finally made sense. I thought it was just a random last name that Lloyd read off the briefcase
Travel agencies are still a thing, they're just a bit more niche I guess. We used one when we booked our honeymoon and they were awesome. They did all the organization and itinerary so all we had to do was show up. The agent also knew a lot of the best places and attractions and the general vibe of the resorts and hotels that were available.
Born in early 90s, but I did get to experience this expertise as late as 2002/3. Had a project involving LEDs and I remember walking in there as a kid and this grey beard was helping me out with a question I had about the wiring for my project.
“You’re going to need a schematic—do you know what that is, a schematic?”
And then he went and explained what it was and helped me choose some items. Good lord we’ve devolved into such mediocrity all in the name of profit.
Commented on this above but I’ll expand here. I worked there starting in ‘97. We had a strict dress code and had to pass internal certifications for all major business categories. I don’t remember it all now but there was a time I knew how to wire resistors, diodes, different kinds of switches, speaker resistance, etc… we had books and bubble tests.
When I was new the focus was on getting name and address, selling the service plans, getting people on the RS card, and selling batteries.
By the time I left it was a cell phone store that sold parts, accessories, and warranties. Every cell was worth $20-30 in SPIFFs plus commission. Accessories were an add’l SPIFF for each with multipliers for the more you sold. A single cell phone with all three accessories and a warranty was worth $75-90 in my check.
We were ranked in the store and district level monthly based on cell phone sales. The more you sold, the easier/cushier the monthly meeting was. The target was 1 cell phone for every 20-25 tickets you rang. If you had less than 1 in 40 you had a super long, remedial meeting about how to sell, and how to sell phones. It was horrible having top cell sales in the district one month and then getting a crap schedule the next month, being at the bottom, and having to sit through a meeting that I didn’t need to be in.
The last time I went in there it was two guys in street t-shirts who didn’t know shit about anything except the phones they sold. It made my pressed pants, button down shirt, and nice shoes every day feel a bit like a waste.
The RadioShack in my home town doubled as a computer shop. I spent many hours in that place as a kid, and bought two of my first computers from there. Plus countless other things, yep including some obscure electrical components, and of course it fed my ham radio hobby. I miss that place.
Radioshack carried a house brand of solder that I haven't been able to find that specific mix of before, but it's been the best I've used. I bought 6 rolls of it about 10 years ago and I'm almost out now.
It'll be a sad day.
I worked there during the time they were cutting out all of what made Radio Shack great and trying to compete with Best Buy and Circuit City. Every new shipment was more iPods and TVs and cell phones with instructions to start dismantling parts drawers to make room.
Saturn. When it first came out it was affordable cars and no haggle pricing. Close to the end they were selling more expensive cars, convertibles and bigger SUV’s.
I worked for Saturn from 1987 thru 1992. It was a really great company. Great culture, mostly great management, awesome union leadership and a truly dedicated salaried and hourly workforce. The first models were all engineered in house and produced at Spring Hill. The dealer organization was second to none.
And then GM said nope...we are gonna run you same as the other marketing divisions. They parachuted management from the rest of GM into the organization. Destroyed the culture and many of the people who made the company awesome left.
Why does upper management never follow "if it ain't broke don't fix it." If I found myself plopped into upper management of a company new to me and everything was going fine, I wouldn't change a thing, just try to keep it on the rails. I feel like upper management always needs to change things to try to make themselves feel useful.
They have to justify their exorbitant salaries to themselves and others somehow, same with upper management in universities. So they try to change things to say "look I'm doing xyz, pay me more!" Sometimes it works and you get a good work culture like OP explained. But most times its trash
Hollywood video and of course Game Crazy was fantastic
Kb toys at least where I lived was like "Toys R Us at home" it was in the strip mall and was a much smaller store than the nearest toys r us
But they did have that Sega exclusive
There's still a Tower Records in ~~Shinjuku~~ Shibuya, a district of Tokyo. It's the same neighborhood also famous for Hachiko the Dog and the world's busiest pedestrian crossing. When I visited Tower Records there, I took a picture holding up a copy of *[All Things Must Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Things_Must_Pass:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Tower_Records)*, a documentary about the rise and fall of Tower Records. The ~~Shinjuku~~ Shibuya Tower store still exists because it was independent of the US stores.
Sears has already been said, and is probably the most impressive one. It was THE major retailer in America at one point and pretty much invented catalog shopping. For it to have gone completely away is pretty astonishing.
Others I can think of offhand:
Car brands: Oldsmobile & Pontiac
Computers: Compaq & Gateway
Stores: Service Merchandise & Circuit City
Restaurants: Bennigans & Po Folks
At one time Sears sold HOUSES in their catalog. You'd pick out whatever house you wanted from the catalog, call or snail mail your order to Sears, and a little while later a train delivered everything needed to build your mail order craftsman home - lumber, siding, windows, doors, etc
There's an online registry of all the ones that still exist in the US.
Fuck, they'd make a killing selling affordable and well built modular homes today. If there was a streamlined process and people could pretty closely estimate costs, I could see it being very popular today.
My favorite anecdote about Richard Sears is how he insisted his catalogs be slightly smaller than the Montgomery Ward ones, so when someone cleaned up and stacked them his would be more likely to be on top
For those interested - there’s an excellent podcast episode by 99% invisible called “the house that came in the mail” that talks all about the Sears catalogue houses.
A Raspberry Pi is [4.5 times faster](https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/01/17/comparing-the-1970s-cray-1-supercomputer-against-the-raspberry-pi-single-board-computer-range-raspberrypi-hacksterio/) than a $7.5M Cray-1 supercomputer from 1978.
Oh man, Service Merchandise and Best Products... A showroom where you brought the tag up to them and they would get your product from the storeroom. Basically catalog shopping, in person.
My dad worked at Sears for 25 years. I worked there in college summers. They let themselves be taken over by vultures who then sold off their best assets for short term sugar rushes on the quarterly earnings. Bled dry. There are now 12 sad stores left in the US.
Crazy thing about sears is that they shut down their catalog instead of turning it digital, and Amazon shortly afterward got it's start. Sears could've been the Amazon if it actually had the vision.
They suffer some of the issues Amazon does with waste. For example, folks would order a type of curtain in three or four colors to see which they liked and return three of them. They catalog was edging toward being a loss when floorspace was becoming increasingly more profitable in the early 90s.
1993 was the last catalog.
Amazon did begin in 1994, but was just books then.
Around 2000 online ordering was beginning to be significant. Amazon wasn't eating into booksellers until then.
Borders. I used to love Borders. It was my favorite store. Thankfully, Barnes and Noble is starting to become like Borders. Hopefully, they also don't end up like Borders, lol
I went there back when the final Harry Potter book came out, it was such a huge celebration, it even garnered tv news stations to cover it, and I might’ve been on tv at that point
Quiznos. Just watched a video on their downfall. The founders sold to someone who expanded and then they made a subsidiary to sell supplies to franchises at a higher price than their normal vendors. They made like $200m on just supply sales to franchise owners while only $70m on royalties from franchise sales. So franchises were losing money, sued the owners of Quiznoes, and a lot shut down and then Quiznoes declared bankruptcy.
I never realized Quiznos had nearly gone out of business until reading posts like these on AskReddit. In the three cities near me there are still four Quiznoses. For reference, in those same cities there are six McDonalds. I always thought they were one of the more popular fast food places.
I mean.. not technically *forgotten*
they just don't operate anymore ;)
Probably the single most influential company of all time... I guess Google might be getting there
Heh. Yeah. There are a hundred books published every academic year where at least a chapter is dedicated to their influence in one matter or another. Forgotten in popular lore? Maybe. Still studied relentlessly to this day.
But, again, in the popular imagination they *probably* don't exist at all.
Uk
Woolworths - Once a high street staple. Just vanished after going bust (I think technically one survived somewhere)
Adams - big kids clothing retailer in the 90s. Just sort of dwindled away.
JJB - Was one of the biggest sports retailers in the UK. Now its not.
Toys R Us - We all remember the the adverts though.
Northern Rock - Big victim of the 09 crash
Bebo - Was briefly the go to social media site
SAAB - Good solid reliable cars. Still technically trading but no new cars since I think 2011?
Because of the 2008 crash GM killed Saab, Saturn and Pontiac, and sold Opel and Vauxhall to Peugeot-Citroen. Nowadays Opels and even Citroens are just cheaper, crappier FIATs because of Stellantis. The automotive industry sucks so much nowadays.
RCA in the US - popularised the purchase of radio sets in the 1920s, popularised the superheterodyne radio which greatly improved reception, created the first national US radio network (NBC), ‘Photophone’ - sound on movie film, RCA Records, deeply involved with electronic television - pretty much created colour television…
…wiped out in the 1980s after a couple of decades of terrible business decisions including deciding to get into businesses like car rental (they owned Hertz for a while), frozen foods and greeting cards. For a while, RCA coasted on an ocean of money from licensing their television patents, but they eventually lapsed.
The rise and rise of Japan’s electronics industry meant they were confronted with much more innovative and faster moving rivals which decimated their business. And then there was the Capacitance Electronic Disc - a decades long project to put video on to vinyl discs that eventually came out with a non recordable player just as the VCR arrived in people’s homes.
Technology Connections on YouTube has a hugely entertaining multipart history of the CED and how it helped wipe out RCA.
Was about the mention the CED. They couldn't live with somebody else's format dominating the early home video market. :/ All the money they lost developing it...
Techmoan shows the interior of them well.
It wasn't good quality like LaserDisc and Betamax. It wasn't convenient to manufacture like LaserDisc, Betamax, or VHS.
VHS won because it was cheaper, easier to manufacture, was easy to record on, and had better marketing.
Sad to see RCA fall. It was a giant of the last century. The RCA cable lives on in tribute. :)
Silicon Graphics and going waaaay back and the reason Silicon Valley exists is Fairchild Semiconductor, which still exists in the way that IBM is still around.
They also refused to go the consumer route thinking business sales would be enough.
I remember an article quoting one of the BB execs saying something along the lines of “it really hit me when I went to a big corporations meeting and everyone had 2 phones on the table in front of them -the work BB and their personal phone.”
I had a Blackberry Torch around 2008 or so, and I had zero interest in using a touch screen keyboard. I loved that thing. I could text people in class without looking down because I could feel all the keys.
But then I saw a Galaxy for the first time, and noticed how sharp and smooth everything was to operate. I remember a bunch of friends playing Fruit Ninja, but all I could get on my BB was some laggy knockoff. That was the beginning of the end for me.
And when they went keyless with the [Storm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Storm) it was garbage.
The thing didn't even have WiFi! What it did have was a truly terrible touch display that you had to press twice to type anything, once to select a character and once to enter that character.
I almost bought one but got a iPhone 3G instead.
> In a 2015 book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, the authors argued that the Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history.
I mean, [Microsoft Kin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin) was also pretty bad, being killed off in 2 months. And the [HP Touchpad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad) was a tablet killed off after 49 days.
But none of them helped bring down an entire company / brand.
Netscape spent their last few months tidying up their code and opensourced it while they still had control before the liquidators took over. It's now known as Firefox browser.
Awww man, Waldenbooks. I remember getting paper gift certificates for them for Christmas when I was young and then being so impatient for them to open back up *and* for some adult to take me there so I could buy Nancy Drew mysteries!!
It was sort of like two Christmas presents in one with a big stretch of torture in the middle lol.
It’s ironic that the movie You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks was basically about a big bookstore (Borders) running a small bookstore out of business. Now the big bookstore is out of business.
Sierra Entertainment spearheaded the majority of point and click adventures. They even published the first Half-life. Since then, they have been divided and passed around different companies. They are now a shell of what they once were.
I left Arthur Andersen about a year before Enron. None of the clients I worked on were scandalous.We had great corporate parties/events. It was pretty cool for a 23yo.
I own 3 Scion xb great little car. 18 year old car and still carry all my dogs and kids good gas mileage and cheap to fix. If i can find a newer one I'll get on for each of my kids to learn how to drive a stick
Fuji made a similar transition to business conglomerate based off their chemical patent portfolio, only 20 years sooner and without the bankruptcy part.
They're a publicly traded company. At one point during the late 2017 crypto boom their stock price tripled simply because they announced they were going to use the blockchain.
Sears. Chronic mismanagement by so called superstar CEO's left the company in dire financial straights and out of step with time. then the last CEO basically intentionally tanked the company so he could sell off they properties because the space was more valuable than the actual store.
Cars: Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Mercury, Studebaker, DeSoto, Checker, Saturn, Packard, Rambler. And those are just some of the American companies.
I'm honestly not sure why people say this on Reddit whenever Circuit City gets brought up. I was around in the 90s when both stores were super popular and Best Buy was always better in my mind. Circuit City was fine, but their customer service was shit. If you thought Best Buy CS was pushy, Circuit City CS would bug you ever corner you turned and never knew what you were talking about. Best Buy also seemed to have a better selection and more items in stock. There's a reason why Circuit City failed decades ago and Beat Buy is still surviving to this day.
Touchstone Pictures was a distribution label that Disney founded in the 80s that helped save the company. They discontinued it about a decade ago. Great films that came from it include Lincoln, Splash, Ed Wood, Dick Tracy, Good Morning Vietnam, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Sister Act. They defined a lot of the 80s and 90s entertainment. It is almost forgotten now.
Similarly, New Line Cinema was known for taking highly profitable risks like A Nightmare on Elm Street, TMNT and Lord of the Rings. They were bought by Warner in the '90s but continued to operate independently until the late 2000s, when The Golden Compass bombing led to Warner gutting them as an independent company.
I loved that logo that slid in from the right. That's really what I think of when I think about watching VHS's.
RadioShack. Remember when you could walk in and get a battery or obscure cable? It was like a tech treasure chest, but now it’s just nostalgia in a digital age.
My dad graduated with an electrical engineering degree in the late '70s, but even well into the '90s I can still remember him packing up the family (including us tiny kids) to spend a solid half hour at Radio Shack every other weekend. He'd just be getting handfuls of little resistors and switches and bits of wires and stuff that I have no idea what it was for, but he could tinker with it on his projects. And the staff there actually knew what the hell he was talking about and was able to work with him to figure out what things would work for his projects. The last time I went into one, which must have been mid '00s, the staff was all about selling phones and had no knowledge about electronics. I don't even know if there is anywhere local that you can buy all those odds and ends now, I think I'd have to just order it online.
>And the staff there actually knew what the hell he was talking about I noticed that at some point in the mid to late 90's, the workers at Radio Shack, Home Depot, Lowes, etc went from passionate subject matter experts to underpaid warm bodies
When people could make a living off the job, they did it because they enjoyed it. When people can't make a living off the job, they find something else.
When people who actually care about what they are doing for a living aren't respected they tend to move on, particularly when their salary is falling and their pension is being removed.
What's a pension?
Mythical rite practiced by members of an obscure and ancient order that believed in the existence of something called “retirement”.
Minimum wage = minimum effort
Act your wage.
Watching a show like The Americans... they ran a travel agency. There used to be a travel agency in most moderately sized cities, supporting anywhere from 2-6 people or more. That's dozens of families in each state. Now, almost all the money goes to a few people that were fortunate enough to be alive during the earlier days of the internet (hotwire and whatever else, idk I'm too anxious to spend any money whatsoever to consider travelling). My mom was a single mother and raised us as a manager at a Samsonite luggage store at the mall. I'm sure Samsonite did well enough, and around the country in decent sized cities they supported a manager, a couple staff. I'd assume most of that goes to Amazon now, so 1 person can build his own space program. Probably supports some underpaid amazon warehouse workers and drivers There used to be choices in smaller and mid sized cities... now in my city it's healthcare/state working at a group home, manager at a Dollar General who works 80 hrs a week, supermarkets (being treated like shit). So many jobs got consolidated into whoever was able to make a well known website and become a billionaire. And there's just more and more people every day
Speaking of Samsonite, it took me like 15 years after first watching Dumb and Dumber to realize that joke, and I started laughing because it finally made sense. I thought it was just a random last name that Lloyd read off the briefcase
If it took you 15 years to get that joke, I hope a bus carrying the Swedish bikini team never pulls up to ask you for directions.
Travel agencies are still a thing, they're just a bit more niche I guess. We used one when we booked our honeymoon and they were awesome. They did all the organization and itinerary so all we had to do was show up. The agent also knew a lot of the best places and attractions and the general vibe of the resorts and hotels that were available.
Born in early 90s, but I did get to experience this expertise as late as 2002/3. Had a project involving LEDs and I remember walking in there as a kid and this grey beard was helping me out with a question I had about the wiring for my project. “You’re going to need a schematic—do you know what that is, a schematic?” And then he went and explained what it was and helped me choose some items. Good lord we’ve devolved into such mediocrity all in the name of profit.
Commented on this above but I’ll expand here. I worked there starting in ‘97. We had a strict dress code and had to pass internal certifications for all major business categories. I don’t remember it all now but there was a time I knew how to wire resistors, diodes, different kinds of switches, speaker resistance, etc… we had books and bubble tests. When I was new the focus was on getting name and address, selling the service plans, getting people on the RS card, and selling batteries. By the time I left it was a cell phone store that sold parts, accessories, and warranties. Every cell was worth $20-30 in SPIFFs plus commission. Accessories were an add’l SPIFF for each with multipliers for the more you sold. A single cell phone with all three accessories and a warranty was worth $75-90 in my check. We were ranked in the store and district level monthly based on cell phone sales. The more you sold, the easier/cushier the monthly meeting was. The target was 1 cell phone for every 20-25 tickets you rang. If you had less than 1 in 40 you had a super long, remedial meeting about how to sell, and how to sell phones. It was horrible having top cell sales in the district one month and then getting a crap schedule the next month, being at the bottom, and having to sit through a meeting that I didn’t need to be in. The last time I went in there it was two guys in street t-shirts who didn’t know shit about anything except the phones they sold. It made my pressed pants, button down shirt, and nice shoes every day feel a bit like a waste.
The RadioShack in my home town doubled as a computer shop. I spent many hours in that place as a kid, and bought two of my first computers from there. Plus countless other things, yep including some obscure electrical components, and of course it fed my ham radio hobby. I miss that place.
Were they Tandy computers?
They certainly sold them, but no one was a ZX Spectrum and the other was a PC. I’m aging myself here.
Radioshack carried a house brand of solder that I haven't been able to find that specific mix of before, but it's been the best I've used. I bought 6 rolls of it about 10 years ago and I'm almost out now. It'll be a sad day.
Probably has lead in it. Leaded solder was pretty easy to work with.
Rosin core lead solder. If you use that stuff you usually don’t need separate rosin and that makes soldering much simpler.
I worked there during the time they were cutting out all of what made Radio Shack great and trying to compete with Best Buy and Circuit City. Every new shipment was more iPods and TVs and cell phones with instructions to start dismantling parts drawers to make room.
I'm thankful to live reasonably close to a Microcenter with a hobbyist section for all my obscure electronics needs.
Our local RadioShack is finally closing down, we can’t believe it lasted this long
Saturn. When it first came out it was affordable cars and no haggle pricing. Close to the end they were selling more expensive cars, convertibles and bigger SUV’s.
I worked for Saturn from 1987 thru 1992. It was a really great company. Great culture, mostly great management, awesome union leadership and a truly dedicated salaried and hourly workforce. The first models were all engineered in house and produced at Spring Hill. The dealer organization was second to none. And then GM said nope...we are gonna run you same as the other marketing divisions. They parachuted management from the rest of GM into the organization. Destroyed the culture and many of the people who made the company awesome left.
Why does upper management never follow "if it ain't broke don't fix it." If I found myself plopped into upper management of a company new to me and everything was going fine, I wouldn't change a thing, just try to keep it on the rails. I feel like upper management always needs to change things to try to make themselves feel useful.
They have to justify their exorbitant salaries to themselves and others somehow, same with upper management in universities. So they try to change things to say "look I'm doing xyz, pay me more!" Sometimes it works and you get a good work culture like OP explained. But most times its trash
Woolworth's (US) Hollywood Video KB Toys
Hollywood video and of course Game Crazy was fantastic Kb toys at least where I lived was like "Toys R Us at home" it was in the strip mall and was a much smaller store than the nearest toys r us But they did have that Sega exclusive
Oh, the lunch counter at Woolworths. That store what a certain smell. It’s like I’m 4 and mom is running errands.
Woolworths UK as well. I think the brand is only still active in Australia now.
The Australian Woolworths has always been a completely separate company.
[удалено]
Service Merchandise, Best, Millers Outpost
Service merchandise had the best Christmas catalogs ever .
My sister used to work at Mervyns! My mom would call up there and prank call her.
Go, Mervyns!!
They're still in Dublin
GAWD I miss Tower Records! I practically lived in that store!
There's still a Tower Records in ~~Shinjuku~~ Shibuya, a district of Tokyo. It's the same neighborhood also famous for Hachiko the Dog and the world's busiest pedestrian crossing. When I visited Tower Records there, I took a picture holding up a copy of *[All Things Must Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Things_Must_Pass:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Tower_Records)*, a documentary about the rise and fall of Tower Records. The ~~Shinjuku~~ Shibuya Tower store still exists because it was independent of the US stores.
It's actually Shibuya, not Shinjuku
You are describing Shibuya, not Shinjuku. There are Tower Record in both, though
Sears has already been said, and is probably the most impressive one. It was THE major retailer in America at one point and pretty much invented catalog shopping. For it to have gone completely away is pretty astonishing. Others I can think of offhand: Car brands: Oldsmobile & Pontiac Computers: Compaq & Gateway Stores: Service Merchandise & Circuit City Restaurants: Bennigans & Po Folks
At one time Sears sold HOUSES in their catalog. You'd pick out whatever house you wanted from the catalog, call or snail mail your order to Sears, and a little while later a train delivered everything needed to build your mail order craftsman home - lumber, siding, windows, doors, etc There's an online registry of all the ones that still exist in the US.
They were very solid homes too, it's not uncommon to find them in older neighborhoods.
Detroit specifically is filled with them, whole neighborhoods full. And they were certainly built to last.
I grew up in one, and it definitely had its age quirks, but it was sturdy as hell
Fuck, they'd make a killing selling affordable and well built modular homes today. If there was a streamlined process and people could pretty closely estimate costs, I could see it being very popular today.
Sears WAS the Amazon of it's day. It just completely and utterly failed to adapt to the internet.
My favorite anecdote about Richard Sears is how he insisted his catalogs be slightly smaller than the Montgomery Ward ones, so when someone cleaned up and stacked them his would be more likely to be on top
Ok that is quite literally a genius move, I'd have never thought about that
Someone needs to invent a sequel to the Internet so that Amazon can fail to adapt.
My wife’s childhood home was a Sears house built in 1911. Sadly it burnt down about 20 years ago.
For those interested - there’s an excellent podcast episode by 99% invisible called “the house that came in the mail” that talks all about the Sears catalogue houses.
Gateway....when everybody woukd get all excited about a moo cow spotted box.
Compaq and Gateway and all of their “never obsolete” computers. But I grew up with them :)
Gateway and cow print, name a more iconic duo
What’s crazy to me is I play with the raspberry pi. It’s probably is as powerful as those early Compaqs for less than $50.
A Raspberry Pi is [4.5 times faster](https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/01/17/comparing-the-1970s-cray-1-supercomputer-against-the-raspberry-pi-single-board-computer-range-raspberrypi-hacksterio/) than a $7.5M Cray-1 supercomputer from 1978.
A first gen Pi (2013) is about as good as a Pentium II. A gen 4 Pi is about 4 times as powerful as a Pentium 4.
Oh man I loved Bennigans back in the day. That monte christo sandwich was everything.
Oh man you brought me back. That Monte Cristo sandwich was so damn good
Oh man, Service Merchandise and Best Products... A showroom where you brought the tag up to them and they would get your product from the storeroom. Basically catalog shopping, in person.
My dad worked at Sears for 25 years. I worked there in college summers. They let themselves be taken over by vultures who then sold off their best assets for short term sugar rushes on the quarterly earnings. Bled dry. There are now 12 sad stores left in the US.
Crazy thing about sears is that they shut down their catalog instead of turning it digital, and Amazon shortly afterward got it's start. Sears could've been the Amazon if it actually had the vision.
They suffer some of the issues Amazon does with waste. For example, folks would order a type of curtain in three or four colors to see which they liked and return three of them. They catalog was edging toward being a loss when floorspace was becoming increasingly more profitable in the early 90s. 1993 was the last catalog. Amazon did begin in 1994, but was just books then. Around 2000 online ordering was beginning to be significant. Amazon wasn't eating into booksellers until then.
Borders. I used to love Borders. It was my favorite store. Thankfully, Barnes and Noble is starting to become like Borders. Hopefully, they also don't end up like Borders, lol
I went there back when the final Harry Potter book came out, it was such a huge celebration, it even garnered tv news stations to cover it, and I might’ve been on tv at that point
My Borders turned into some kind of organic grocery store.
My mind is incapable of forgetting Borders 😢 loved that place
Quiznos. Just watched a video on their downfall. The founders sold to someone who expanded and then they made a subsidiary to sell supplies to franchises at a higher price than their normal vendors. They made like $200m on just supply sales to franchise owners while only $70m on royalties from franchise sales. So franchises were losing money, sued the owners of Quiznoes, and a lot shut down and then Quiznoes declared bankruptcy.
I never realized Quiznos had nearly gone out of business until reading posts like these on AskReddit. In the three cities near me there are still four Quiznoses. For reference, in those same cities there are six McDonalds. I always thought they were one of the more popular fast food places.
They used to have 3k locations world wide. Now they only have like 150 in America.
Remember those old commercials of the rat things singing? “Eat Quiznos suuubs, they have a pepper BAR”
K Mart
K-mart probably the biggest home goods / clothing retailer in Australia and is known for its cheap but good quality items
My local K-Mart has become a Wegman's Edit: Astor Place in Manhattan
that's a W
egman's
" I just shipped my pants "
East India Company.
I mean.. not technically *forgotten* they just don't operate anymore ;) Probably the single most influential company of all time... I guess Google might be getting there
Goggle hasn't colonized half the world and started wars yet, but they're probably close.
I think Amazon will be in the first corporate war before Google, personally.
Heh. Yeah. There are a hundred books published every academic year where at least a chapter is dedicated to their influence in one matter or another. Forgotten in popular lore? Maybe. Still studied relentlessly to this day. But, again, in the popular imagination they *probably* don't exist at all.
Uk Woolworths - Once a high street staple. Just vanished after going bust (I think technically one survived somewhere) Adams - big kids clothing retailer in the 90s. Just sort of dwindled away. JJB - Was one of the biggest sports retailers in the UK. Now its not. Toys R Us - We all remember the the adverts though. Northern Rock - Big victim of the 09 crash Bebo - Was briefly the go to social media site SAAB - Good solid reliable cars. Still technically trading but no new cars since I think 2011?
SAAB is still big, they make kick-ass fighter jets for the Swedish Air Force.
Mothercare, Our Price, Rumbelows, Virgin Records, Friends Reunited, British Home Stores.
Because of the 2008 crash GM killed Saab, Saturn and Pontiac, and sold Opel and Vauxhall to Peugeot-Citroen. Nowadays Opels and even Citroens are just cheaper, crappier FIATs because of Stellantis. The automotive industry sucks so much nowadays.
RCA in the US - popularised the purchase of radio sets in the 1920s, popularised the superheterodyne radio which greatly improved reception, created the first national US radio network (NBC), ‘Photophone’ - sound on movie film, RCA Records, deeply involved with electronic television - pretty much created colour television… …wiped out in the 1980s after a couple of decades of terrible business decisions including deciding to get into businesses like car rental (they owned Hertz for a while), frozen foods and greeting cards. For a while, RCA coasted on an ocean of money from licensing their television patents, but they eventually lapsed. The rise and rise of Japan’s electronics industry meant they were confronted with much more innovative and faster moving rivals which decimated their business. And then there was the Capacitance Electronic Disc - a decades long project to put video on to vinyl discs that eventually came out with a non recordable player just as the VCR arrived in people’s homes. Technology Connections on YouTube has a hugely entertaining multipart history of the CED and how it helped wipe out RCA.
Was about the mention the CED. They couldn't live with somebody else's format dominating the early home video market. :/ All the money they lost developing it... Techmoan shows the interior of them well. It wasn't good quality like LaserDisc and Betamax. It wasn't convenient to manufacture like LaserDisc, Betamax, or VHS. VHS won because it was cheaper, easier to manufacture, was easy to record on, and had better marketing. Sad to see RCA fall. It was a giant of the last century. The RCA cable lives on in tribute. :)
Ask jeeves
Yellowpages -- the Walking Fingers was very recognizable
DEC and Sun Microsystems, two of the most influential Hard- and Software companies
Silicon Graphics and going waaaay back and the reason Silicon Valley exists is Fairchild Semiconductor, which still exists in the way that IBM is still around.
BlackBerry
The phone that refused to go keyless and lost.
They also refused to go the consumer route thinking business sales would be enough. I remember an article quoting one of the BB execs saying something along the lines of “it really hit me when I went to a big corporations meeting and everyone had 2 phones on the table in front of them -the work BB and their personal phone.”
I think they could have found a niche with the keyboard if they had made an OS that kept up with iOS and android.
I had a Blackberry Torch around 2008 or so, and I had zero interest in using a touch screen keyboard. I loved that thing. I could text people in class without looking down because I could feel all the keys. But then I saw a Galaxy for the first time, and noticed how sharp and smooth everything was to operate. I remember a bunch of friends playing Fruit Ninja, but all I could get on my BB was some laggy knockoff. That was the beginning of the end for me.
I remember a time when I was working with some job agencies and all of the e-mails I got had a notation "Send from a Blackberry".
And when they went keyless with the [Storm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Storm) it was garbage. The thing didn't even have WiFi! What it did have was a truly terrible touch display that you had to press twice to type anything, once to select a character and once to enter that character. I almost bought one but got a iPhone 3G instead. > In a 2015 book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, the authors argued that the Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history. I mean, [Microsoft Kin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin) was also pretty bad, being killed off in 2 months. And the [HP Touchpad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad) was a tablet killed off after 49 days. But none of them helped bring down an entire company / brand.
They're still around, just more of a software company now
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Commodore, makers of the Vic 20, Commodore 64, and Amiga computers.
Loved my commodore 64 and Amiga 500 and 1200
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Sun Microsystems Netscape BBNPlanet Inmos Quarterdeck
Netscape spent their last few months tidying up their code and opensourced it while they still had control before the liquidators took over. It's now known as Firefox browser.
Gateway, known for its distinctive cow-spotted boxes, is now forgotten.
TWA
And Pan Am!
TWA lives on as a hotel in JFK Terminal 5, it’s super old school inside and even has an old plane they converted into a bar.
Waldenbooks, Borders, Electronics Boutique, GemCo, Best, Emporium Capwells, Natural Wonders, Nature Company…
Awww man, Waldenbooks. I remember getting paper gift certificates for them for Christmas when I was young and then being so impatient for them to open back up *and* for some adult to take me there so I could buy Nancy Drew mysteries!! It was sort of like two Christmas presents in one with a big stretch of torture in the middle lol.
It’s ironic that the movie You’ve Got Mail with Tom Hanks was basically about a big bookstore (Borders) running a small bookstore out of business. Now the big bookstore is out of business.
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The Montgomery Ward
Jordache
Sobe
This one hurts. That carrot orange drink drived
PanAm
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Sam Goody Camelot Music Nobody Beats the Wiz Crazy Eddie's
"I'm the Wiz!"
Crazy Eddie, his prices are ...... insane!
Columbia House
SAAB - Swedish car manufacturer, made pretty decent cars.
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Cingular Wireless
Hydrox. They were the original oreo creme cookie, IIRC
Proof that marketing is sometimes everything. Worst thing Hydrox had going for it was the name. Sounds like an industrial cleaner FFS
Sierra Entertainment spearheaded the majority of point and click adventures. They even published the first Half-life. Since then, they have been divided and passed around different companies. They are now a shell of what they once were.
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Anyone remember Caldor? It was regional, like a Kmart/walmart-ish department store.
And Leachmere. Hello fellow (one time) New Englander
And Ames, Zaire, and Bradlees
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Lehman Brothers, Arthur Andersen
I left Arthur Andersen about a year before Enron. None of the clients I worked on were scandalous.We had great corporate parties/events. It was pretty cool for a 23yo.
Blockbuster. My childhood. Also eb games
Scion
I own 3 Scion xb great little car. 18 year old car and still carry all my dogs and kids good gas mileage and cheap to fix. If i can find a newer one I'll get on for each of my kids to learn how to drive a stick
Northern Telecom
We had Marshall Fields in Chicago. Was a department store, that got bought out and rebranded Macys. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Field%27s
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Kodak
Very much still around, just not in consumer space. Source: my paycheque
Pics or it didn't happen? 😁
They’ll have to send it by mail
Fuji made a similar transition to business conglomerate based off their chemical patent portfolio, only 20 years sooner and without the bankruptcy part.
Fujifilm still makes very popular consumer cameras, one of their cameras is basically impossible to buy in a store because of how popular it is.
I’m looking at Kodak tower right now from the AAA ballpark, it’s still here!
Momma took my Kodachrome away.
They're a publicly traded company. At one point during the late 2017 crypto boom their stock price tripled simply because they announced they were going to use the blockchain.
Zenith. Sadly I rode that stock all the way down.
Sears
Kinkos
Doesn’t FedEx still kind of do business as them?
yup. they acquired all their business afaik. but, no more 24hr last minute college nights
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Zellers!
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Phar-Mor. Man, I loved that store. If I couldn't find it at an independent pharmacy, Phar-Mor was where I went.
Sears. Chronic mismanagement by so called superstar CEO's left the company in dire financial straights and out of step with time. then the last CEO basically intentionally tanked the company so he could sell off they properties because the space was more valuable than the actual store.
Cars: Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Mercury, Studebaker, DeSoto, Checker, Saturn, Packard, Rambler. And those are just some of the American companies.
Payless Shoes
Circuit City. That place was way better than Best Buy.
I'm honestly not sure why people say this on Reddit whenever Circuit City gets brought up. I was around in the 90s when both stores were super popular and Best Buy was always better in my mind. Circuit City was fine, but their customer service was shit. If you thought Best Buy CS was pushy, Circuit City CS would bug you ever corner you turned and never knew what you were talking about. Best Buy also seemed to have a better selection and more items in stock. There's a reason why Circuit City failed decades ago and Beat Buy is still surviving to this day.
Rose colored glasses probably. Circuit city was essentially the Walmart of electronics stores and Best Buy was the Target.