The Discount Store (or, Big-Box Bankruptcy)

In the late 1990s, my Dad entertained a visiting group of six Russians from his company’s Russian operation. For a few weeks, they were regulars in our lives.

On a night when they asked to do their own thing, I ran up the street to shop at the discount super store. As I shopped,  I found them hanging out at the retailer. Their translator and only English speaker saw me. “Bill, we cannot believe this store. We have nothing like this!” he exclaimed. In a store that sold virtually everything, they only bought pints of whole milk to take back to their hotel.

This super center concept was a spectacle in the mid-1990s, when this discount store chain confronted its competitors. Originally the retailer operated a smaller location in our town, competing with defunct retailers like Gold Circle, Best and Zayre.

But the super center was an upgrade, incorporating a complete grocery section that quickly hooked my mom. The ubiquitous logo lit our suburban night when the store replaced the abandoned drive-in on the main street through town. As teenagers and college students, we played its arcade games and ate at its café. We loitered in the aisles. On any visit, I could guarantee that I would run into someone I would know from school, church or yes, Russia.

Other super centers arose as this one declined. Once numbering in the dozens, the chain’s super-centers now claim one location, as economics and poor returns mothballed the rest. The store where I ran into the Russians has been torn down.

I leave out the name because you can figure out which discounter. This national chain has struggled to maintain a hold in a brutal age for brick-and-mortar retailers. The store took a beating from a renown 1980s movie and became an easy subject for mockery.

In a class-conscious, sometimes superficial suburb, the fact that our clothes sometimes came from the discount store was a point of derision from our classmates. My Mom had to clothe three kids on a budget, and what they sold didn’t seem any different to me than what anyone else wore (it was, and the other kids noticed). When they opened the super center, the naysayers shopped there too.

For most of my early years, we shopped there regularly. Mom bought much of our childhood Christmas gifts there. In 1983, after searching all summer for Lando Calrissian in his Jabba’s palace disguise (I was a sucker for toys with removable helmets), we found him a month before Christmas. “You didn’t see this,” she said as she tucked the figure into the shopping cart and I failed to contain my glee. Lando would join my action figure battles on Christmas Day, and the retailer made that possible.

Despite its flagging fortunes, I still try frequent the store, frustrated as I grow with the register lines that never move. Somehow the stores always stock items I cannot regularly find at neighborhood shops. When we needed rain ponchos for Titans game or small propane cylinders for our grill, the retailer saved us. We had one in my previous Nashville neighborhood, which has since closed. In our new neighborhood, the discounter occupies one of the largest retail spaces. For the most part, it seems to succeed.

The retailer had been in a prime spot, then its fortunes sank in the early 2000s. Malfeasant leadership played a role, as the retailer contended with a mini-version of the Enron scandal. The stores remained, but the company never fully recovered them from scandal. As other retailers sprinted, the discount store could only limp.

More aggressive competitors relegated this retailer to the second tier. An awkward merger with another retailer seemed like a good match until I realized the move was more of a Hail Mary. As happens too frequently, corporate tourists barely warm the CEO chair before leaving with a giant severance check, while the staff of the local store seemingly rotates between every visit. Still, the staff are nice, the prices are not as bad compared to the grocery store. Anytime I would buy plants, the ladies at the registers would get chatty, swearing they couldn’t keep plants alive.

Appearance counts in retail, and the company could not keep pace. Technology in stores fell behind. The floor tiles cracked and yellowed, the shelves old and disjointed. No one can miss the amount of empty space the manager tries to conceal with well-placed displays. The computers running the registers operate in fits and starts. In the past year, they received new computers and card readers, but those types of upgrades came too rarely.

In springtime, I felt at home in the garden center, always picking an array of new plants and fresh soil for our container garden. I could spend less elsewhere, but plants are what I like best from this store. Every year I visited with the expectation that the last garden run might lie around the corner.

Our local site still eked out good margins, avoiding the ax that falls every quarter when results fall short of projections, until one quarter when the store didn’t pass muster.

On a rainy Friday in November 2017, the corporate ax fell. We knew the day would come. The calls for upscale retail on the same site likely will go unheeded. The store was among the few places low and middle class people could shop in the area without a major drive.

If not for a long history with the retailer, I probably wouldn’t miss the place. When any institution closes its doors, people will feel some pang of emotion. Soon the lights will go out permanently. For now, I plan to keep shopping, although we won’t reach another gardening season together.