This has got to be Peak Department Store Era, when it seems some made the effort to make visiting them an event.
Stores were in downtown, right? Among the skyscrapers.
As late as the 1970s, when I was a boy, I think I remember visiting the old Downtown of Los Angeles near Christmas and it still had at least one of its’ old big chain stores, I remember walking down the street outside and looking at the Nativity and Santa Claus displays in the storefront windows.
They had also installed Christmas decorations and lights in Downtown, hanging overhead, that entire hazy memory is quite magical. Then in the blink of an eye, it seems, before my mind was fully developed, everything switched to malls near suburbs.
The thing is I can still glimpse a tiny bit that old era in my mind. Then I can clearly see the mall era when downtowns crumbled, and then the new re-emergence of this part of cities as a desirable place to be or visit.
There was one of these in Rochester NY at the Midtown Shoping Center until the early 00s, they would set it up during Christmas and it would go through a fake mountain. It was a blast I think it was the same exact design as this one.
is there a chance the track could bend?
We can’t have anything cool anymore. Every little thing is cost optimized down to the last penny. Self checkout in a soulless white box is the future.
Ya see, I’m split on it. On one hand, when I was a kid and I saw videos with old-timey american big shops - be it toys, department or something - all big, open, welcoming with everyone smiling and that super fun and nice atmosphere I was sooo sad I couldn’t experience that.
On the other hand, self checkout cuts roughly 5-10 minutes of time each time I go to the shop, and as I pretty much speedrun what I need and beeline it to checkout, that means I am spending 10 minutes max at any shop with these. It’s so damn convienient I started ignoring shops without it.
But then…I live in european country, and there the only thing preventing theft is a scale inbuilt into self checkout, sometimes coupled with receipt barcode scanner at the exit. Most bigger, and I mean bigger, shops with these have whole one employee per 6-8 of self-checkouts, pretty much there to help in case of approving your age or dealing with more problematic products, like clothing, rarely with something too light for scale to detect.
Self checkout in a soulless white box is the future.
Why wouldn’t it. What do you need from a checkout? I want to leave the store, not be entertained, coerced, woo-ed, just leave.
My local Walmart has had so much theft they’ve blocked off all but 5 self checkout machines, which are manned by 2 associates at all times. Over the years they’ve gotten rid of all but 8 registers. Now these registers are all open and the lines reach the middle of the store. I hate going there now.
Also everything with a resale value is locked up in cabinets and the one associate with a key can never be found no matter how many times she’s paged by other associates.
If Walmart wasn’t cheaper by a giant margin I would never shop there again. But all Canadian grocery stores are owned by Billionaire aashats who raise the prices of everything then blame everyone else
I was in NYC a few weeks ago and needed to buy some face wash, since mine was too big to take on the plane. Usually I just buy some when I get to my destination rather than fucking with the travel bullshit. Welp, literally everything in the entire store was locked, and they wanted $16 for a $6 bottle of face wash, and $8 for a $1 shower floofie. For fucking real.
i started shoplifting from Walmart after i heard they were closing self checkouts for theft
i figure if they want to make up fake reasons to cut costs, ill do my best to make them not liars
I wonder how well those were maintained
