Buddy, can you spare a dimestore?

By the end of this month, Zellers will have closed all its stores. Some of them will be taken over by U.S. retailer Target, while others will give way to different retail or non-retail uses. I see it as the end of an era.

When I was a child and a teenager, there were lots of dime stores out there. I used to make regular trips to the Woolworth's at Elmvale Shopping Centre or, farther afield, at Billings Bridge. And if I went downtown, there was also the Metropolitan ("the Met", with its catchy slogan, "Meet me at the Met"), Kresge's... and Zellers. There were also the bigger, discount versions - K-Mart (affiliated with Kresge's); Towers (which had been Freimart and later got taken over by Zellers); Miracle Mart (the same people as Steinberg's); Woolco (affiliated with Woolworth's, and later bought out by US giant WalMart) and so on. My allowance went a fairly long way in those stores. Their toy departments featured items I could actually afford - marbles, skipping ropes, yoyos, dolls' clothes, and so on. Then there were always craft supplies - crayons and coloured pencils, paste and glue, construction paper, scrapbooks. And candy, and ice-cream sandwiches, which were always in a full-sized cooler at the front of the store. As I moved into adolescence, I became interested in their make-up counter, where I could spend hours looking at the frosted lipsticks and nail polishes that were fashionable then, or the blue and green eyeshadows and thick Maybelline eyeliner and mascara. Clothing was sold there too, at affordable prices.

Nowadays, we do have "dollar stores", but they're definitely NOT just dimestores adjusted for inflation. (Nor are they comparable to the "cent shop" concept, as exemplified in a home formerly occupied by Nathanael Hawthorne, in Salem, Massachusetts.) They don't have a soda fountain (where I used to love getting strawberry sundaes) or restaurant or sell candy and baked goods in bulk, the way the dimestores used to. I remember being fascinated by the birthday cakes in the shape of a number - but I got as far as the age of ten without ever having one bought for me. I don't suppose the cakes were that appetizing - probably gluey white cakes with icing in rather poisonous-looking colours, but whatever the case, they were magic to me as a child. And as I had a summer birthday, my friends were usually away on holidays when my birthday happened, so I never really had a birthday party until I was ten or eleven.

Anyway, Zellers was the last remaining dimestore on the retail landscape, as far as I'm concerned, and soon it will be no more. I'm sad to see it go.