Another terribly blurry picture, but you know I can't resist escalator views! This escalator conveniently links the toy department upstairs with the kids' clothing section on the middle level. Perfect for tormenting your kid who hates shopping! (Yes, that was me as a kid, and I still hate shopping for clothes -- hence why this blog is about 90% grocery stores.)
Ha, I hated shopping for clothes as a kid. I don't really like it even today, but I guess it is more tolerable now. But, anyway, while shopping for clothes at Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other department stores was tiring, those same stores had really neat electronics departments and other fun departments so I never held that against department stores. Granted, things were a lot different at department stores in your era as compared to mine.
ReplyDeleteFoley's (which became Macy's) had some fun things for kids. A couple of their stores had pirate ships which kids could climb on in the children's department and the Willowbrook Mall Foley's had a tube type thing children could climb in. This is all gone today though even though those stores still exist as Macy's!
Even when I was a kid, I gravitated towards things like kitchenware and luggage at department stores, just because I didn't like clothes shopping! Luckily, these days I can (and do) buy pretty much all of my clothes online.
DeleteAny sort of fun things like that were gone by the time I was around, including toy and electronics departments -- at least in the small rural JCPenney and Gottschalks we shopped at. I probably wouldn't have minded shopping as much if I didn't have to just sit around and wait for my parents to look around and never buy anything! ("Shopping" without actually buying anything is a very common thing in my family, which is probably why I never find it weird to photograph stores without buying anything the way some people do. That's also why I find all of the security measures stores are trying that try to prevent people from leaving without buying something so annoying -- even when I'm not visiting a store for retail geekery, there's still a good chance they won't have the specific thing I was looking for and therefore I'll leave empty-handed!)