Phthursday Musings: Blue Light Special

As of this weekend, there will only be 3 Kmart stores left in the United States, one each in New Jersey, New York, and Florida. There are people who can speak more definitively to how unbelievably poorly Sears and Kmart have been run for a long time… I’m not going to get into that here.

I grew up in a city with multiple Kmart stores and, until I was about 8, no Walmart stores. When it was time to go buy things, 94% of the time, that meant grocery store, mall, or Kmart. (4% of the time it meant yarn… I think.)

It’s not that Kmart had everything. But it did have lamps and baseball gloves and a lot of basic clothes and toys / children’s activity items and it did a lot of those things better then than Walmart or Target does today. But, of course, it didn’t need to do too much. Today is all about too much, and, terrible corporate management aside, Kmart was ultimately doomed by being a store that couldn’t do too much, but having to exist in an era where everybody demands too much.

The Kmart nearest us was on Sandy Hollow, just off 11th Street. Imagine a very wide parking lot, a Kmart at the back of the lot, and then a row of stores off to the side on the right. Along the back, to the left of the Kmart, a small, old grocery. In the row of stores, something called One Stop Pharmacy, which was, well, a pharmacy, and had a lot - a LOT - of wood paneling; a place which I think sold La-Z-Boy recliners; and a store which sold - or, uh, rented (!??!?) - Colortyme televisions. At the street, two restaurants - a Long John Silver’s and a Ponderosa. Best as I can remember, I went to Long John Silver’s zero times, and Ponderosa 14,219 times. Years later, the strip of stores on the right included something called Unclaimed Freight Outlet, and then a satellite off of that, the Two Buck Outlet.

The Two Buck Outlet was there when I was old enough to drive. The gimmick was that everything cost $2, but depending on what the thing was, maybe it was 1 for $2, maybe it was 3 for $2, maybe it was 13 for $2. One day I was in there, and they had on hand, at the price of 40 for $2, an entire box of these:

That is a glow-in-the-dark keychain. If you can’t quite tell, the logo in the lower right of the circle is the then-logo of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. And, yes, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, in the catchiest-ever attempt to get people to squeal on their fellow humans, came up with the acronym RAP as shorthand for REPORT ALL POACHING. This… was the early 1990s.

Naturally, I bought 40 of the keychains. I gave most away at school the next day.

Not all of them, though…

When I was younger, I had this preposterous idea that what I would collect would be collections. To that end I had collections of, among other things: coins, Mold-A-Ramas, flags, Slinkys, cups… I mean, I can only imagine how horrified my wife is at the moment thinking about how it would be if I hadn’t gotten rid of 95% of all of it. (I still have the Slinkys. Hmm, also the flags. And, yeah, I have a lot more Mold-A-Ramas. Oh, that’s why she makes that face at me every day…)

One of the collections was keychains. There used to be a lot more, many in the shape of the number 1, collected from such places as a relator’s table at Harvard Milk Days or whatever. Above, though, you see that the collection has dwindled. There’s a keychain from the Saint Louis Zoo. There’s one from seeing The Chinese Magic Revue of Taiwan at the Woodstock Opera House, which I think consisted of many tremendous feats, but in my mind mostly consisted of a person riding a huge unicycle catching apples on a knife in their mouth? There’s one that just says ABUELO, which I think I got because I was mesmerized by how poorly made it was. And, sure enough, one of the original REPORT ALL POACHING keychains.

One day I called the number and thanked the person who answered the phone for doing something about poaching.

Many years before discovering the keychains, my dad and I were in the small grocery. I’m not really sure why, since a much larger grocery was just down 11th Street, but, there we were. There was a young woman there behind a stand, conducting a live taste test! COKE OR PEPSI? Well. I knew the answer would be Coke. I drank both samples, said which one I liked. She said: “Congratulations! You chose Pepsi!”

Did I really?

I have long wondered what happened there. Was I duped? Would she really have told the next person: “You slug! You chose Coke!” No… I think they were both Pepsi. It’s the only explanation that makes sufficient sense. Kind of a prelude to seeing The Princess Bride, maybe?

Buttercup: To think, you had the Pepsi in front of you the whole time.

Westley: Actually, they were both Pepsi. I’ve spent the past few years building up a tolerance to the blasted stuff.

Let me explain how a meal at Ponderosa would go. Maybe you’ve forgotten. Maybe, somehow, you never went there.

I was under 12, or at least I was under 12 the entire time that I was under 12. And so I ordered a chopped steak. You stand in line for a while, you get to the front of the line, you place your steak order, see? And then you’re given one of those triangle jobbies with a number and you go sit down and then you hit the salad bar.

At the salad bar, I would get lettuce and green peppers and cucumbers and cheese and diced ham. My best recollection is that there were no chicken wings for a long time but maybe they showed up later? I don’t know. I called the diced ham “little hams”. My god, I think I had a two pound salad consisting largely of little hams. This was before they brought me a steak. Admittedly not a huge steak, but still.

The steak came with fries. Fat fries. Steak fries, even. Fries-with-steak, steak-fries. Yes, they must have been steak fries. Could I have ordered a baked potato instead? Probably? Why would anyone do that? They used to serve baked potatoes at Wendy’s, didn’t they? Why? Why?

Anyway, I ate everything, a lot of food, and then went up and got ice cream. Soft-serve ice cream, the kind that swirls out of the machine. Complete with a toppings bar. So a lot more food, after the food was gone.

And, seriously, this must have happened at least 22,817 times. I must have eaten 14,219,102 little hams at the Sandy Hollow Ponderosa alone.

It’s been at least 30 years though. The last time I had actual food anywhere around that shopping plaza, it was at the Long John Silver’s, about 16 years ago, except, it wasn’t a Long John Silver’s anymore, it was a place called Thai Hut, and I ordered cashew tofu, and my mom was with me, and I think was intensely confused by what I was eating, probably because the tofus were too big and too pale to be little hams.

As for the Kmart itself, I know a lot of clothes came from there over time, and also a lot of those Magic Ink books, the ones for kids aged 8 to 88, because SCREW YOU NONAGENARIANS.

That Kmart had a layaway department. I never quite understood what the layaway department was for. Frankly, I still don’t quite understand what the layaway department was for. Please do not respond by lecturing me on how layaway works. I am not sure I believe that the layaway department actually handled layaway. I am, in fact, not sure that it was a department. In my mind, it was a window, well, not a window, more of a big rectangular hole in the wall, behind which they were a lot of hooks with little tabs on them. I think it was a front. Not sure what it was a front for, but whatever it was, it definitely had me fooled.

I believe if you kept walking past where the layaway department hole in the wall was you would get to the electronics department, which I think meant camera and television sets. See? No need to go to specialty stores. You could get your borax and your camera at the same store. (Could you get borax in 1984?)

The main thing I remember procuring at that particular Kmart, though, was a big book of math problems. Multiple such books, in fact. I am not joking. The pages were probably 11” by 14” and I believe they were grade level targeted books and I remember working through many of those. Now I might not be remembering the number of books very well. But, no joke, we would go to the store, so that I could come home with math problems to do, or at least, my dad would get whatever belt or television or sock he needed, and I would get math problems. I loved math problems and frankly that has not changed very much. This past weekend, there was a one-day 12 question pen-and-paper math special at Learned League. My wife came into the office at one point and asked what I was doing. I said, I don’t think you want to know. She sighed and said, that means you want to tell me. I said, I’m doing math. She fled.

(Learned League, incidentally, you all should do that. If you get into the same rundle as me, you’ll probably beat me, because although I clean house in certain categories, I’m awful in others. I especially get clobbered at film and food. I guess even though I’ve been vegetarian for 18+ years I never really got much more sophisticated than little hams.)

That Kmart actually had its own… restaurant? Food wall? Grub stand? I’m not sure exactly what the correct term is. I can vouch that the hamburgers there do not kill you. At least, if they do, it takes a loooooooong time for it to play out. I might have to get back to you on this.

The funny thing is, although I remember there being Blue Light Specials, I don’t really remember that being especially important. In retrospect, that’s what most people remember, that’s even what they adjusted their branding to focus on in the ‘90s. In the ‘80s though I just kind of remember that the bizarre cart with a blue light on the top would be sitting around ladies’ tops pretty much every time we were in the store.

Oh, they also had one of those horsey rides out front. A quarter to ride the horsey. Who pocketed that change, anyway? Kmart? Was there a guy who had cornered the market on putting horsey rides in front of Kmarts?

The Kmart closed who knows how long ago. It’s been at least 25 years since I was in there. The closest I got was Thai Hut, and even that is over 15 years ago.

That entire Sandy Hollow and 11th Street corridor… I’d say it’s weird now, but in retrospect, it was probably pretty damn weird 35 years ago. Definitely 20 years ago. I’ll be right by there this weekend. Maybe I’ll go take a peek.

Google Maps says that the Kmart is a COVID-19 Vaccine Location, so, that’s cool.

The strip mall off to the side apparently has a nail salon (which, maybe, it always did??), a tobacco shop, something called Number 1 Oriental Buffet, and a Dollar General, which is not even half as exciting as the Two Buck Outlet was.

The street view shows that the Ponderosa was a Mexican restaurant, and the Thai Hut was still there, as of 2019. Mostly it all looks like desolation though.

It also reminds me that, inexplicably, there’s technically a street running through the middle of the parking lot, that being Bildahl Street. Bildahl is one of those street names which, growing up, you’re convinced you’re not saying it correctly. I can only assume that Bildahl was the name of some gregarious Swedish fellow.

No, I didn’t intend to devote an entire entry to a shopping center. But this is the stuff that’s formative to a developing child. And it’s the contrast against which I can crash stores today, which are shinier, brighter, tidier, and… comparatively, pretty damn soulless.

This means that I’m arguing that Kmart, of all places, had soul. And, well, so I am.