And I'm a child of mid-century America, not the Roaring Twenties.

(not a chain, different from Woolworth).



We had one on our little shopping strip back in the sixties-seventies, must have been there since the thirties-forties.

It stayed open on Sunday but closed on Saturday to comply with Texas blue laws.

Great stores. Great memories.

in it!

Got my model paint and glue there, also.

Some older people referred to the five and dime and I'm pretty sure there were a couple of songs that used that term.

Last edited Sun Nov 25, 2012, 06:56 PM - Edit history (1)

There may actually have been stores called "10 cent stores" or the like, like the "Dollar" stores of today--or it may just have been a "catch-all" term that was coined in the day.

My favorite was a little old cluttered "five and dime" store (whose real name escaped me) that resided for decades in a very tiny Missouri farm town where my grandparents lived at the time. The store had old creaky wooden floors, though you could only tell by listening as there was so much stock, you couldn't really see the floors very well. The owner/proprietor was known for restocking about 15% or so with new items and the rest was the layered creation of years (or sometimes decades) of merchandise that she rotated from back room stock. But, ALWAYS after revising the prices upward! LOL....

It really was a fascinating store, especially if you were feeling nostalgic as you'd find toys and all kinds of merchandise in the original wrappers from what was often a decade or more ago. My sister and I always made a "beeline" for that little store and would revisit several times during the course of our stay, as you could continually find more stuff the more you "dug"....LOL

It is long gone now and the owner surely deceased, but those were some wonderful memories.

My grandparents would come into town on a Sat. to the hardware store, and we could roam around as much as we wanted to, because we knew NOT TO TOUCH anything.
And there was a place that had real scoop ice cream, I always got blackberry ripple. It had FLAVOR, as I remember.
This was 1953 thru 1958.
The farm got eaten by the "new" freeway ( thanks, Eisenhower) in late 1958, grandparents bought a house near Greenlake in Seattle then.
Sigh..no more cow. no more checkens and eggs and homemade bread and butter. Sigh.

But I do remember the "dime" stores, in several towns I lived in.
They were magical, to a 7 year old.

It generally referred to Woolworth's

I used to call them 5 and 10 stores.

Late '50s, early '60s. I remember it had wood floors and shelves or bins where they put the merchandise (which was not encased in those horrible plastic shells that you need a Sawz-All to open) and you could just look through it. We'd go there to get stuff like wax lips and doll clothes and trading cards. Anybody remember trading cards?

one kid looked at me "you mean the dollar store?"

actually, I meant the drugstore, but I grew up buying aspirin at the dimestore (and it had the big red 5-10-15 cent sign above the door...)

But we didn't call it Woolworth's. They sold a lot of stuff for a nickel or a dime, even when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s. The main things I remember there were the "made in Japan" china horse statuettes - I still have some that sold there, though I never bought them, they were gifts to me. And the popcorn machine - we never got store made popcorn (or even movie popcorn). But it was cool to watch the machine make popcorn when I was a little squirt.

It closed after the mall opened with a Grant's department store. The 5 & Dime was downtown so that left a big hole in Main Street.

Based on a play of the same name.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Back_to_the_Five_and_Dime,_Jimmy_Dean,_Jimmy_Dean_(film)

Woolworth's. I remember they had a lunch counter. And they sold candy (I was a kid).

A friend, Karen Plunkett-Powell, wrote a coffee table book- "Remembering Woolworth's." It's still available from Amazon.

of small bins, all full of stuff priced for a dime or a quarter

I think that was probably close to the original concept, with some later inflation thrown in: bins of stuff everybody needed, at pocket change prices -- spools of thread, packets of needles, shoelaces, combs, nail files, pencil sharpeners ...

They still have them in England.
Also S.S. Kresge, predecessor of K-Mart, and also Kress.
TG&Y.

In Houston, Village 5&10 was in West University Place off Kirby Drive. Near Rice University. They finally closed down a few years ago when the owners got old.

a Woolworth's and a Hestead's. We called them dime stores. Woolworth's was still in business in the early 60s and maybe later.

I remember buying tiny heart-shaped bottles of Blue Waltz cologne at Woolworth's for around 25 cents a piece when I was around 10 and dousing myself with the stuff before going rollerskating at the roller rink, so that I'd smell byootyful as I zoomed by everyone.

for 25 cents.
Every year!
And she always acted surprised to get an ashtray.
and by the next year, it would be gone, somehow, so I knew "just what to get her" the following Christmas.
I think I wised up by the time I was 10.

It took a while for civilization to get to us. We were always behind in everything. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I went with my Paw Paw to the ice house to pick up a block of ice on occasion. It was a real, for sure, room, sitting alone outside. You go in, and it's full of big blocks of ice, like in the olden days. They pick them up themselves, the ice men, with those big fork like prongs.

We had one library, one Five and Dime store, one clothing store, one diner (the Busy Bee), one grocery store, one movie theater but that closed, one medical clinic (I was born in a neighboring town because our town didn't have a hospital). I'm talking about the white side of town. There was a black side of town, literally across the railroad tracks. I guess they had their own stores, since they weren't allowed in the white ones. Times were very different then.

Miles and miles from anything big.

There are "dollar Tree" stores here, I guess the inflation version of the 5 and dime.

It still gives me a shock to see a regular Hershey Bar selling for 1.00, tho.

remember colored day old chicks for easter at the TGY

5 and 10

then there were Woolworth's and Kresge's.

They were the fourth largest retailer n the country and largest privately held (I think). I worked at a JJ Newberry's.

"At its height, McCrory's operated 1,300 stores under its own name as well as TG&Y, McLellan (merged in 1958), H.L. Green, Silvers, G.C. Murphy, J.J. Newberry and Otasco,[2] which it had acquired through the years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrory_Stores

The owner, Riklis, was the husband of Pia Zadora. Remember her?

My Mom called them the dime store. They were either a Woolworth's or Sprouse Reitz. (I'd forgotten that last name, until a poster upthread mentioned them).

And I remember the wood floors and everything in bins or on shelves.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane.

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... mostly Woolworth's, but others as well.
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I worked my way through college at a small family-run wholesale greenhouse in
the mid-to-late 80's and some of our biggest customers were local/regional
Woolworth's.
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I love Nanci Griffith and this is one of my favorite of her songs (it's from 24 years
ago and she's still just as gorgeous):
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Nice sense of humor, too.

... it always confused me because there wasn't very much you could buy for 5 or 10 cents.

In Portland, the great big Santa Claus parade is in the morning on that Friday. Now, it's the My Macy's Holiday parade. Still going strong!

After the parade, my cousin and I would go to Woolworth's to look for presents for family.

No black Friday then! It was a day full of fun.