5 & 10s

Years ago my sister came for a visit. As we were driving through Warrenton she saw the old Pay Less Drugs (now Rite-Aid) and we had to make a stop there. It seems my sister loved reading a series of books by some Northwest author that wrote about how fantastic it was to go to town and visit the Pay Less. My sister wanted to see if it was a magical as the books described it. I never read those books, so I don’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she seemed satisfied.

This got me thinking about if I were to write about the shopping experiences that turned me on as a kid, what would they be? I’d probably have to say it was all the Five and Ten Cent Stores. Some called them Five and Dimes, but that didn’t make sense to me because they should have called them the nickel and dime, so we called them Five and Tens.

The 5 & 10 was a magical place for a kid and this was probably due to the fact they had toys and bicycles and candy for sale. They had all sorts of things like a general store would have and it was a frequent stop for moms that were trailing kids along. While the moms were shopping for kitchen ware or a new lamp shade or greeting cards kids were free to visit the toy department or look at the birds, fish and turtles that were for sale in the pet department.

There were two 5 & 10s in the town to the north of where I lived and two to in the town to the south along with a Woolworth. These stores all had a lunch counter where uniformed waitresses worked the counters and sold fresh roasted nuts by the cash register. The smells of each department were good enough to leave an impact on me forty years later.

My words could never describe all the magic of a 5 & 10 and I write this only to remind those who are old enough to remember to golden age of this sort of store just what sort of magic we are missing today.

Years ago there was a Newberry’s in Astoria which is now Deals only. I don’t recall if Newberry’s had a lunch counter, but like most other 5 & 10s it had a lower level. One thing I remember was how clean the 5 and 10s were. They were nothing like the squalid mess of Deals Only, where some isles are impassable with boxes of merchandise yet to be stocked.

The post tomorrow will discuss one of the must-have items that all respectable 5 & 10s had to have. Thanks for indulging yet another of my walks down memory lane.