Dime Store Blues

I sometimes wonder when they're going to go—the ten cent stores. There are only two left on King Street now. Sometimes, on riding down King, I almost cringe, anticipating reality's stinging blow: a For Sale sign in one or both of their windows. It has already happened once, as Silvers—my very favorite—was transmogrified into a trendy clothing store, only to close several years later. Let that be a lesson to those who would tamper with the natural order of things. Let the deviant developers and anarchistic architect think twice before they line up Kress or Woolworth between the crosshairs of their sinister sextants.

It was always very clear to me that the Silver's building was a five-and-dime store, and that any attempt to coerce it into being something else was preordained for calamity. I visited the new clothing store a number of times, but never purchased a single item. It was not that their racks and tables were devoid of quality, nor that their prices were exorbitant. Neither were their sales people unprofessional or unfriendly. But it was not their floor. It was still Silver's, a creaky old wooden floor, that was not meant to carry preppy looking store clerks fawning over browsing patricians or cash emburdened tourists, but instead, plainly dressed middle-aged ladies, presiding over endless racks of $5 dresses and $10 suits. And not a highly burnished floor, but a bumpy, dust-imbedded one that sagged under the weight of aquariums filled with goldfish and turtles with names on their shells, canned goods, and magnificently cluttered toy counters. A floor that still preserved between its polyurethaned planks dirt from the soles of black U.S. Ked easywalkers and my mother's brown and white spectator pumps. A walks on this floor jarred out flashbacks of ecstatic moments when I located a toy soldier I didn't have or one of those new celluloid boats to add to my all wooden fleet, or when my mother bought me a bad of cashews, which at that time had a per pound price much less than New York strip.

Being encapsulated in my own personal time warp, it's no wonder I never made a purchase at this clothing establishment. I'm sure I became a topic of conversation/object of derision among the store staff:

Clerk 1: "Yeah, he never buys a damn thing, just walks around like he's in a trance or some kind, occasionally glancing at the floor. I finally stopped offering to help him when he asked me where the wind-up army tanks were, and then he got agitated when I told him we didn't have any."

Clerk 2: "That's nothing. I caught him scraping out dirt from between the floor planks and putting it in a vial. Gives me the creeps. I'm glad we're closing. Maybe he'll spend more time at his halfway house now."

And if there are other middle-aged people out there with the same nostalgia affliction, it's not difficult to understand why the business closed.

I think it is also incumbent upon me to appeal to these same people to unite to conserve our last remaining vestiges of dime store heritage. Therefore, I ask that anyone wishing to join this worthy cause write OMNIBUS in care of the Coalition Resolved to Enshrine the Economic Emporiums of the Past, Soon (CREEPS).

Unless we act soon, it will only be a matter of time before businessman in Atlanta with a first name like Lanier or De Treville has an orgasmic night frenzy about a chic emporium or haute monde restaurant in the place of Kress or Woolworth.

"Oh, Megan, it just came to me. Chaaaaarleston doesn't have a Bulgarian Bistro restaurant or a shop specializing in coats of arms flags for houses and cars. You remember those two tacky looking old ten cent stores on King Street. Power to the people, Megsie! Rich people, that is."

Of course, Kress and Woolworth are a little tacky. They're dime stores, they're supposed to be. But it's a good kind of tackiness. It has character, tradition and originality. And it's disappearing quickly from American culture. Where else can you go see row after row of gaudy lingerie, velvet artwork, oriental rugs made in Spartanburg, aisle after aisle of inexpensive knick-knacks displayed nowhere else, and that big orange-colored peanut shaped candy, that's made out of special marshmallow-styrofoam formula. I think I ate one in 1946 and immediately spit it out. I don't believe any kid in America eats them, much less in Charleston. Children-hating people give them out at Halloween, and I believe it was brought out in the Nuremburg trials that the Nazis force-fed them to GI POWs to make them talk. We should be very grateful to Kress and Woolworth for not selling them to Saddam Hussein. The war may have turned out quite differently. Nevertheless, if for some humanly incomprehensible reason, you should ever need this loathsome candy, you will only find it in a ten cent store.

Oh sure, K-Mart, Wal-Mart and the other marts have some of the same items as Kress and Woolworth, but there's no comparison really. They're too high-tech, too glitzy, too antiseptic, too unoriginal, and they were not the first; too Nouveau tacky! And, most importantly, they don't have display windows. So what, you say, all the shops in King Street have beautifully decorated display windows. You're quite right, certainly, but none of them have display windows like Kress and Woolworth. While the vendors of chicness dole out hundreds or thousands to window artists for lavish displays, the dime stores have a totally different approach:

Intercom: "Hey, Louie, when you finish unloading that truck, how about putting some more stuff in the windows."

The result is primitive, unaffected, yet absolutely effective display art that only Kress and Woolworth can create. Nowhere else will you see boxes of Borax, shoe polish, and mops and brooms commingled with unmanekined dresses and t-shirts, toys, and an unopened case of hairspray or motor oil. These may be stockmen, but they have the soul of Andy Warhol. They have not tried to overpower or beguile the prospective customer, they have simply told us:

"This is Kress (or Woolworth). This is what we have. This is what we are."

They have shown us the essence of the dime store.

We had better pay attention.