Closing Time

“Closing time – You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

Few people mourn the passing of a retail store. You shop at the local K Mart for fifteen years, you know the layout. You know where they keep your favorite brands of toilet paper and candy bars. You know where the clearance items are displayed. You never know what might be there at the clearance aisle. Maybe it’s that CD that you’ve been wanting but has only the one song you’ve heard on the radio and liked – the rest of the CD is an unknown quantity. And you don’t want to pay full price for a CD that has only one good song and the rest is garbage.

And then, seemingly just like that, they announce that the store is closing. Your shopping habits are changed. Maybe you attend the Going Out of Business Sale. In your mind, you plan alternatives. You think that once the store closes for good and you’ve finally run out of the 24-pack of Charmin that you bought at the Going Out Of Business sale, you’ll have to bypass the carcass to park far out in the parking lot at Wal-Mart and wait in interminable lines to get through the checkout.

You never think about the people who worked there. You never think about the front-end manager who runs out of one-dollar bills on a holiday weekend. You don’t know about the store manager who worried about the next district manager visit or running out of an item advertised in the Sunday flier or how he’s going to run the store with so few employees. You never question where they went. Did they go to another store? Did they leave retail all together? Maybe they went back to school.

And what of the building? In a mall, the space is usually recycled pretty quickly. Most of the time a new tenant is in the space before the next Christmas season. If the store’s in a strip mall, it can languish for months before it’s filled again. If it’s a stand-alone store it may never be recycled. It may sit and quietly rot until moss and mushrooms grow on the floor like the old Goldblatt’s store in Park Forest.

In any event, there seldom is any evidence that the old store was there. Just memories. There’s no memorial or testimonial to the people who labored there or the people who shopped there.

I was a retail manager for ten years. I managed a B. Dalton bookstore. It was different from other retail, at least that’s what I told myself. It took brains to manage a bookstore. It took knowledge and intelligence.

B. Dalton, like other retail chains, liked to start their managers out at small stores and let the individual managers rise through the levels. I started out that way. The first store I managed was in Park Forest. I had been assistant manager there for a year before becoming manager and I helped open the store. It was a very slow store. There were days we just barely made $500 the entire day.

The Park Forest store closed two years later, and I helped pack the remaining computer books to return to the publishers. Years later, the whole Park Forest Plaza was “demalled” and a street was paved down the center, where a flowing fountain used to be. The B. Dalton store was partially demolished for a connecting street.

My next store was in downtown Chicago in the Xerox Building. It was a very plush store. There were lockers and a kitchenette in the break room. It had a mezzanine where we displayed the children’s books. It was meant to be the District Manager’s office but the DM had moved from there, wisely, before I got there. The store was a mess when I inherited it. I spent the first two months just cleaning it up. It closed a year later. My district manager called me at home on Tuesday night and told me the store’s last day of business was Friday. I had been blindsided but I learned a lesson, or at least I thought I did. Retail is never permanent and the only constant in retail is change.

That store remained vacant for a short time then it was remodeled into an investment firm.

My third store was in Yorktown Mall, near Montgomery Wards. It was a healthy store, nonetheless. Still, on summer weeknights I could have rolled a bowling ball down the center aisle not hit a customer. While I was still there, Woolworth’s closed its huge two-story store directly across from B. Dalton. It hurt business, especially since we had to stare out at the empty windows for the last nine months I was there. Still, we managed to do $16,000 on one day before Christmas.

By then, the writing was on the wall, although I refused to see it. Barnes and Noble had opened their first store in Wheaton, just a few miles west.

For my last store, I transferred to Bloomington. I had attended ISU, so I knew the community. And there were no superstores. Yet.

Within the first year I transferred, Barnes and Noble announced plans to open a store. It opened by the time my first year anniversary in Bloomington rolled around. I held tight. I didn’t want to transfer to the superstore division. Besides, my store was being remodeled.

In May of 95, we packed most of the store up and moved it to a temporary store in the Bergner’s wing. The store was expanded and remodeled from floor to ceiling in the new purple and sea-foam green color scheme. It was such a beautiful store.

But by that time I was burning out. I had had enough. I wanted weekends off, like normal people. I refused to see the writing on the wall. I denied that there was a problem and kept holding onto the illusion that retail is permanent.

The end came on a bright October day with a surprise visit from my district manager. Unsubstantiated accusations were heaped on my head and unpleasant words were exchanged. He gave me a choice – an untenable set of working conditions or quit. I chose the latter. Suffice it to say the parting was not magnanimous. To punctuate my decision, I threw – really tossed – my store keys at him and told him to run the store through the Christmas season.

Seven years have passed and I found out that the store in Eastland Mall was to be closed. I was saddened but unsurprised. By now I beginning to let go of the myth that retail is permanent.

I wanted to make one last trip to the store. I planned on it. They were having a Going Out of Business sale and perhaps I could pick up some bargains. I had only been in the store once since that day in October. About a year later I stopped in while Sears installed new tires on my car. The last day of business was July 30.

I never made it. I was not working on July 30, but I was tired and needed a day just to vegetate.

I realized that I really didn’t want to see the store again. And I wouldn’t know anyone working there.

Still, I wondered about some sort of memorial. Some kind of testament to the people and hours, worry and sweat that had been invested there.

Today, I went to the Bloomington Public Library. There’s a book that I’ve wanted to read and we can’t check out any books from Borders because inventory is coming up. Our library is open on Sunday and I was surprised at the number of patrons on this beautiful, sunny afternoon.

In the middle of the aisle on the adult side, there it was in all its purple and sea-foam green glory. We called it the foursquare display. B. Dalton had obviously donated it to the library.

As I sat down at the computer to look up the book that I wanted, I spotted several other displays, some of them still empty as if they had just been moved into the library. They looked out of place in the main circulating room which dates from the mid-seventies. The purple and green shelving units clashed with the orange carpet and the original dark wood shelves. As I went to find my book, I spotted even more shelving from the store. The entire Young Adult section made use of the shelves from the store.

I smiled to myself. I smiled from ear-to-ear. Here was the memorial. These shelves were being put to good use. Even if the library decides to discard them in three years or open the branch that they’ve always talked about (providing they ever pass the referendum) they will have served a good purpose. They have provided more shelving for the library and they will remind everyone that there was once a B. Dalton store in Bloomington.

Swinging my book and with a smile still on my face, I stepped out into the bright sunshine. And I remembered that nothing is permanent. Not even in retail.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
Semisonic, Closing Time

© 2004 Nick Archer