I thought this plaque about the history of Nordstrom Rack was an interesting touch. The Westlake Center location is a fairly new location that serves as the flagship store more or less, as much as that concept exists for the low-end brand of a chain.
It seems odd to commemorate the history of a clearance store, but celebrations of retail history in general are usually lacking so I won't complain about this. I didn't realize that Nordstorm Rack goes back that far, but OTOH, I can't say I'm too surprised. Most department stores back in the day had bargain basements or some other sort of clearance department. Some chains even had clearance stores including Sears of course who only recently got rid of their clearance stores.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I ever told you about this, but Mike from HHR and some other fellow Houston retail enthusiasts encouraged me to go through my large amount of VHS tapes from the 1980s to see if there were any interesting commercials on them. While I didn't go through all of them, I did go through quite a few around Christmastime and captured some...mostly ones of local interest to Houstonians but there are some Kroger and Safeway ads in there. Mike put them on his YouTube page. If you want to check them out, here is the link. Mine are all the ones added in December: https://www.youtube.com/user/517634/videos
Anyway, the reason for mentioning all of this is that I did capture a commercial for the Foley's Warehouse Store which was the clearance store for the local Foley's department store. It's not the most amazing commercial, but it's interesting to see all the things department stores sold at one time that they no longer do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF6mInPx56k
Perhaps you might enjoy some of the vintage TV sign-on/sign-off videos I captured. Those seem to be the most popular videos anyway. The concept of TV stations signing on and off might seem foreign for younger people like yourself, but it's certainly something I do remember!
It is a bit odd, but Nordstrom seems to really be emphasizing their history in their advertising these days, at least around here.
DeleteInteresting stuff there, especially the 1990 Subaru commercial, which seems fairly early for them!
Unfortunately, for a lot of department stores these days, their history is just about all they have going for them! I'm not sure if things are quite so dire for Nordstrom, but I'm sure these aren't exactly their greatest days. It seems like they're better known for Nordstorm Rack these days than their main department stores (we have both forms of Nordstrom here in Houston).
DeleteOddly enough, Subarus might have been more popular in Houston in 1990 than they are now! Subaru used to sell regular FWD versions of their cars back then and that appeals to many people here more than AWD cars since we don't get a lot of ice. We used to have a local Subaru dealership in the early 1990s, but they closed and we didn't get another Subaru dealer in this area until just a couple of years ago.
The dealership in that 1990 Subaru commercial is the legendary Mac Haik chain of dealerships in Houston. They used quite a catchy jingle back in the day. They may still use this, but I don't watch much TV so I don't know. Here's the full jingle which is also from my VHS commercial collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX44936LJR0