Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/20/there-is-one-remaining-woolwor.html
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So in the UK, Woolworths was a nondescript high-street store selling general crap, in Australia it is/was a supermarket, and apparently in the US it was a lunch counter. Are they connected?
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One of my earliest and favorite memories is going to the luncheonettes in my area with my grandfathers.
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the US ones sold lots of general crap, and also had a restaurant/lunch counter. it’s a wonderful thing to know that there is one functioning one left – i thought they were long gone! i used to love going to when the last one in Reno for lunch. when it was closing, i swiped a knife embossed with the Woolworth’s logotype on it. i use it as a letter opener. i kind of feel like i should go to Bakersfield and return my pilfered knife to its rightful home.
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Just to confuse things, they also branded as Woolco.
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Two Woolworth’s lunch counter memories.
There was a Woolworth’s in Glen Cove, down the road from where I grew up. Close enough to go to buy models and such. It had a lunch counter up until the early 80s.
Twice, when I was a kid, I wandered over there for a banana split. They had a deal for these. There was a string of inflated balloons along the top of the rail that ran over the counter. Each balloon contained a slip of paper with price written on it . . . “Free to $1.00” as I recall. You could either pay $0.50 for the ice cream sundae or take your chance with the balloon.
On both occasions, the aged counter attendant (who took orders and fried up your sandwiches or what-not) popped the balloon for me, showed me the slip showing a price for 0.46. "That's .50 for tax. So you saved four cents!" It sounded kind of rote, suggesting that a lot of the paper slips had $0.46 written on them.
Decades ago, when the Woolworth’s chain in America was shutting down: I was driving near Garden City, LI when I heard a NPR show about food and eating. The hosts talked about the venerable Woolworth’s lunch counter, its place in history (sit-ins down south) and its upcoming end.
I remembered that there was a Woolworth’s in the Roosevelt Field mall. I went to have lunch there. It turned out to be there last day!
Grilled cheese on rye bread (all thy had left) with a side of cole slaw.
They wouldn’t let me take a menu. I should have just swiped it.
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I find it interesting that department store lunch counters never had the renaissance that diners did in the ~90s. I remember when there was still a lunch counter in the Woolworths at Laurel Plaza
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In the US and Canada, Woolworths and their competitor Kresge’s were the lower-end department stores of their day. Kresge’s later morphed into Kmart.
After a morning spending your nickels and dimes, where else would you go for a hot beef sandwich and a milkshake?
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I remember when the K-mart in Wheaton Plaza still said “Kresge’s” on some of the more permanent fixtures like the door handles. And there was a “Hot Shoppe’s” cafeteria across the mall.
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What I remember most about Woolworth’s was the florescent colored drink machines (one side chartreuse and the other orange, usually) and the cheap makeup. Also, there was a smell on the clothes – machine oil – because their stuff almost certainly was made by semi- or legit-slaves in factories in non-industrialized countries, at a time when that wasn’t the norm.
Longest lunch counter of any place that had a lunch counter.
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I learned something today. Always wondered where the name of KMart came from. Id heard in passing old stories from older family members of Woolworths and Kresgies, so this makes sense.
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When I worked at Kmart in high school, we’d occasionally find old fixtures or items in the back room with “Kresge’s” on them. We still had a very dated-looking Kmart Cafeteria when I started, but they were all swapped out for Little Caesars chain wide.
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The Kresge’s in my hometown used to have a lunch counter, as did the Woolworth’s the next town over. Both of them folded back in the 80s. When I moved to Hawaii, up until the late 90s, there were still Woolworths open on at least 3 of the islands, still with lunch counters; we ate dinner at one in Hilo. I still have pillow covers I bought at the Honolulu Woolworth’s. There was also a Kresge’s knockoff called Cornet on Oahu.
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I remember eating at the Woolworth’s in Byrd Plaza, Cocoa Florida. My first exposure to curly fries. We used to buy those little styrofoam rubber-band powered planes with WW2 livery on them. I was born in 1984 so it must’ve been around 1990.
I worked there for 4 years, and once performed a version of this timeless classic:
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It sounds like you aimed too low. The folks in Bakersfield swiped the whole thing, and are using it as a diner.
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And Kresge College at UCSC was endowed by the K-Mart money, which is funny since Kresge is (was anyway) the most left-wing college even by UC Santa Cruz standards.
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