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If you went to the Black Friday sales last night (or early this morning, depending on the store) you may be sick of the retail experience right now, but you can sit down, relax, have a nice drink, and read about how your favorite and not-so-favorite stores got started. Considering that most started out small and spread across the country, a store could be a pretty big deal before you ever got a chance to hear about it, much less shop there. For example, the business that became Toys “R” Us started back in 1948!
In 1948, 25-year-old World War II veteran Charles Lazarus began selling baby furniture in his father’s bike shop in Washington, DC. Recognizing the demand for children’s toys, Lazarus soon broadened his inventory and renamed the store Children’s Supermart. He opened Baby Furniture & Toy Supermarket in 1952, using backwards R’s in the sign to grab attention. Five years later, he opened Children’s Bargaintown, which became the first Toys “R” Us, in nearby Rockville, Md. The store’s giraffe mascot, Dr. G. Raffe, was renamed Geoffrey shortly before Lazarus sold Toys “R” Us to Interstate Stores in 1966.
Mental_ floss has the lowdown on this and ten other big box stores. Link
(Image by Flickr user dcmaster)
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Business names don’t always follow the rules of grammar, and some are so old you don’t know for sure if they are grammatically correct or not. But you might know what the signs look like -right? We’ll find out in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. You’ll be given a store name, and you decide whether there is an apostrophe in it or not. It’s not as difficult as it sounds -I scored 80%. Link
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When a TV show has been running as long as The Simpsons has, you get to know its fictional world pretty well. Jeff Wysaski took the information from the show and mapped out all the stores in the Springfield Mall for your convenience. This is only a small detail of the entire upper-level and lower-level map at Pleated Jeans. Link
Businesses all over look for memorable names. Many go with puns, since a funny play on words will stick in your mind. Tanks A Lot is a blog full of punny business names, like restaurants named Beau Thai, Thai Ranosaurus, Thai Foon, or Tongue Thai’d (wonder what kind of food they serve?) or eyeglass stores named Specs Appeal or You and Eye. Link
Photographer Brian Ulrich has spent the last few year examining “the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live.” His latest project captures the beauty and sadness of empty stores and failed businesses.
Most recently a new project began in 2008 entitled Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls. In the recent economic downturn some of the very stores I photographed at the beginning of the project are now emptied and laid barren in the hulking empty architecture of the big box, mall or store.
Link -via Metafilter
