July 18, 2007
Mysteries of Life After Woolworth Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:50 AM EST Josh Zeitz’s feature article on this website yesterday , published on the tenth anniversary of the event it commemorates, is titled “Why Woolworth’s Had To Die.” Josh’s argument about the necessity for the death invokes a couple of causes: If I understand him correctly, he suggests one cause was that Woolworth (along with other chain store five and dimes) perished because it stayed relatively down-market despite rising postwar affluence, which cost it some customers. The other cause was that suburbanization moved many of Woolworth’s customers out of the old downtown business districts and into shopping malls, where newer retailers out-competed Woolworth on price, quality, variety and the design of stores. This makes sense, but what puzzles me is why a decade ago modern Manhattan could not support a Woolworth’s, but now it can support an apparently infinite number of chains of what are nominally pharmacies—Duane Reade, Rite Aid—that seem to me to be not entirely unlike the Woolworth stores of my childhood, minus the lunch counter and the needles and thread. I suppose a five and dime sold a much greater variety of goods than a Duane Reade does, but the gap is surely closing fast. Within three blocks of this apartment there are as many Duane Reades and one Rite Aid, which raises the next question: How can one account for the precise sorts of retailers who serially overpopulate the niche vacated by Woolworth stores? Five and dimes vanished from this part of town decades after I moved into it, and shortly after they disappeared you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting an ice cream store or a Szechuan restaurant, which presumably filled the gap left by the lunch counters of the five and dimes. Within a couple of years most of those outlets vanished in turn, to be replaced by cell phone stores. The cell phone stores were briefly threatened by an astonishing efflorescence of Victoria’s Secret outlets, which almost immediately disappeared. Why was the demand for fried dumplings, if not infinite and eternal, so much more tenacious than the appetite for fancy lingerie? I do not know, but it was. In any event, a number of the cell phone stores survived, and are now being threatened both by a rash of banks and by neo–five and dimes thinly disguised as pharmacies, some of which have the same vague and subtly demoralizing seediness I remember attending the five and dimes. Amazingly, as I think upon them the Woolworth stores begin to possess, if only in retrospect, a mild appeal. Until a moment ago I could still remember their perfect charmlessness, but now that Josh Zeitz writes of them in the past tense, the five and dimes evoke the virtues of a more egalitarian city and have attained the variety of glamor that enshrouds something Hopper painted, rather than the banality of anyplace my mother dragged me when Eisenhower was President and she needed something for the house. I am pretty sure this is mere nostalgia. I am also convinced that someone will someday mourn the passing of the Duane Reades and Rite Aids. But right now I can’t quite imagine it.
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