--- Eugene Balinski <eugeneb@nni.com> wrote:
> Montgomery Ward was a Sears wanna-be in the worst way.
> However Montgomery Ward WAS a thing of evil. They bought
> a great local (to the Boston Area) department store chain
> called Lechemere's, and drove it into the ground right out
> of business. This was 7 or so years ago and there is still
> no decent replacement for Lechemere.
Ward's predated Sears by at least a decade if I'm not mistaken.
They were the *first* national mailorder house, but Sears
became the *biggest*. Sorry to hear about your local store;
the same can be said here in Washington of Marshall-Fields
and Frederick and Nelson in Seattle, and Amfac and Rhodes Brothers
in Tacoma. Two great department stores over a hundred years old
run out of business by acquisitive, incompetent corporate parents.
A whole lot of consolidation took place in the department store
sector in the late 20th century and the results were usually bad,
but who's to say the stores could have survived on their own?
Now it's happening again here in Washington with Macy's taking
over the venerable Bon Marche'. They're already re-branding them
as Bon-Macy's as if the Macy's name means anything back here except
as the setting for "Miracle on 34th Street".
Personally, I think the malls killed department stores. The
stores themseilves, with their restaurants and othen amenities,
ceased to be destinations. I'm *just* old enough to remember
Christmas shopping in downtown Tacoma before the Tacoma Mall,
one of the first in the country, opened in the mid 1960s.
Shopping downtown was a wonderful experience and filled you
very much with the Christmas spirit. The mall, by comparison,
is a sterile shopping machine totally devoid of personality or
culture. I still have an "I had breakfast with Santa at Rhodes"
button.
=====
David Breneman david_breneman@yahoo.com
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