Kids in an mini-monorail inside a department store, Philadelphia, USA, 1950s
I'm dating myself a bit here, but I was on something very similar to this as a young kid and it fucking rocked! I still think about it to this day. Amazing memory.
We can’t have anything cool anymore. Every little thing is cost optimized down to the last penny. Self checkout in a soulless white box is the future.
Self checkout in a soulless white box is the future.
Why wouldn't it. What do you need from a checkout? I want to leave the store, not be entertained, coerced, woo-ed, just leave.
My local Walmart has had so much theft they've blocked off all but 5 self checkout machines, which are manned by 2 associates at all times. Over the years they've gotten rid of all but 8 registers. Now these registers are all open and the lines reach the middle of the store. I hate going there now.
Also everything with a resale value is locked up in cabinets and the one associate with a key can never be found no matter how many times she's paged by other associates.
If Walmart wasn't cheaper by a giant margin I would never shop there again. But all Canadian grocery stores are owned by Billionaire aashats who raise the prices of everything then blame everyone else
i started shoplifting from Walmart after i heard they were closing self checkouts for theft
i figure if they want to make up fake reasons to cut costs, ill do my best to make them not liars
I am vehemently against theft, or at least I used to be. Since they're making me do the work of employees to buy shit, I've started giving myself "employee discounts".
I was in NYC a few weeks ago and needed to buy some face wash, since mine was too big to take on the plane. Usually I just buy some when I get to my destination rather than fucking with the travel bullshit. Welp, literally everything in the entire store was locked, and they wanted $16 for a $6 bottle of face wash, and $8 for a $1 shower floofie. For fucking real.
Ya see, I'm split on it. On one hand, when I was a kid and I saw videos with old-timey american big shops - be it toys, department or something - all big, open, welcoming with everyone smiling and that super fun and nice atmosphere I was sooo sad I couldn't experience that.
On the other hand, self checkout cuts roughly 5-10 minutes of time each time I go to the shop, and as I pretty much speedrun what I need and beeline it to checkout, that means I am spending 10 minutes max at any shop with these. It's so damn convienient I started ignoring shops without it.
But then...I live in european country, and there the only thing preventing theft is a scale inbuilt into self checkout, sometimes coupled with receipt barcode scanner at the exit. Most bigger, and I mean bigger, shops with these have whole one employee per 6-8 of self-checkouts, pretty much there to help in case of approving your age or dealing with more problematic products, like clothing, rarely with something too light for scale to detect.
Wanamaker's, most of it passed over the toy department
ETA: that's according to my mom. I was looking through an old photo album and saw a photo of her and my uncle. They both look very happy, my uncle is pointing down at something.
Apparently we had relatives there and before Christmas they always visited and went to Wanamaker's. Mom said it was the highlight of the trip (as kids), all the newest toys and you got to ride a monorail. After that they went to the restaurant and had a 'snowball' which was vanilla ice cream, rolled in coconut, with a plastic sprig of holly on top.
My childhood did not involve monorails and it shows
Ha! Yes, put the kiddies in the holding cell trains and drive them by all the fun toys. I like it.
There are some great videos on YouTube exploring the history of these. There were multiple department stores that invested in similar kiddie rail systems. For example, Rich’s in Atlanta had one called the “Pink Pig” (it was painted pink).
Yep, here is a great documentary about them:
I can really recommend this channel, it has videos about several interesting topics:
The history of barcodes
How the Spruce Goose was moved to Oregon
That time when Sweden and Germany sent over high speed trains to the US on a sales tour.
The strange bus that drove in the sky.
Modulex, Lego's grown up cousin.
And more.
There was one of these in Rochester NY at the Midtown Shoping Center until the early 00s, they would set it up during Christmas and it would go through a fake mountain. It was a blast I think it was the same exact design as this one.
This has got to be Peak Department Store Era, when it seems some made the effort to make visiting them an event.
Stores were in downtown, right? Among the skyscrapers.
As late as the 1970s, when I was a boy, I think I remember visiting the old Downtown of Los Angeles near Christmas and it still had at least one of its' old big chain stores, I remember walking down the street outside and looking at the Nativity and Santa Claus displays in the storefront windows.
They had also installed Christmas decorations and lights in Downtown, hanging overhead, that entire hazy memory is quite magical. Then in the blink of an eye, it seems, before my mind was fully developed, everything switched to malls near suburbs.
The thing is I can still glimpse a tiny bit that old era in my mind. Then I can clearly see the mall era when downtowns crumbled, and then the new re-emergence of this part of cities as a desirable place to be or visit.