Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

By the time Sears moved from Harden Street to Columbia Mall, it was long past the catalog glory days of being the company you could by anything from, but it hadn't yet been so bloodied in the retail wars that it would reject odd ideas out of hand.

This concrete slab in the Columbia Mall parking lot by the Charleston Crab House (and still actually owned by Sears to judge from the tow-away signs) was one of them. Over this slab was a canopy, and under the canopy was an island with a number of Sears-branded gas pumps. I don't remember a whole lot about the place as we only filled up one of two times there. I'm pretty sure it was self-serve, but since there was no such thing as electronic credit card reading pumps at the time, there certainly would have been a cashiers shed with an attendant. You could pay with cash, or, of-course, with your Sears Card.

My memory is that the place was an experiment that didn't last too long. I don't know exactly what happened, but I can hazard some guesses. First, the location was not convenient unless you were already at the mall. Getting in and out of the mall parking lot was (and is) much more time consuming than stoping at a corner station. Second, in the 70s people actually had some brand loyalty to different gas chains, and felt that name-brand gas was a better product than generic. Now we tend to think it's like sugar, and there's no problem buying Domino's if Dixie Crystals is more expensive. Third, at some point in the 70s (I believe) there was a major scandal about Sears's auto repair operation ripping people off (that's why about all they will do nowadays is change tires or batteries). The opprobrium from that may have tainted their gas business in people's minds. Fourth, it is simply the fact that selling gas was not in the core retail market Sears was (is..) trying to serve. As their fortunes declined, they may have decided that selling gas was a distraction and brand-dillution. (Though I have seen Wal-Mart trying the concept recently..).

At any rate, the place closed after not too many years. The canopy stood for several years after that, but was itself finally torn down. I don't remember the tanks being torn out, and there are still some access points, so perhaps they are still there (though that seems like an enviromental cleanup bill waiting to happen if it really is the case).

UPDATE 20 February 2020: Add tags, address, map icon.

Google is a wonderful thing. I had been noticing this lot ever since I moved back to town, and I felt like I should remember what it was, but I never quite could. I had in my mind that it had been a car dealership, and that may have been correct, given what's left inside now, but the architecture didn't look right for that as a first use.

Plugging the (very visible) street address into Google though reveals that it started life as a Food Lion. In fact, we can find out that it was buit in 1978, has 22,056 square feet available on a 2.34 acre lot, and can be all yours for $900,000.. I can even now tell you that the latitude & longitude for the place are 34.034074 & -81.004620!

I also find that as a Food Lion, the store had followed a practice I dislike: getting it's Deli department into local restaurant listings. I feel the same way about groceries that use their deli to get onto the Interstate "Dining" exit signs.

I don't know exactly what happened to this Food Lion. I know that in the 80s, one of the network news magazine shows did a hit piece on Food Lion that hurt them quite a bit at the time. Perhaps that had an impact here. Perhaps they were planning the new store down Two Notch towards Pinestraw even then. In general I find Food Lions of this era to be a bit dingy and downmarket. Their newer stores are quite nice however -- the one at the South Causeway at Pawleys Island is excellent and even has Virgil's Root Beer. And here's a tip: Almost all Food Lion's have regularly cleaned, nice bathrooms in the left rear corner of the store -- good to know driving in a strange area!

It was drizzling while I took these shots, and the closing-cam works much better in bright sunshine, so the lot and building are not as depressing as they look here.

UPDATE 9 March 2011: Updated the closing date to 1997 based on the comments.

Well, here's another one I managed to miss for a good while. I did a closing for Zorba's on Decker Boulevard a while back, but this one took me by surprise.

To be honest, I only ate at this Zorba's (which was not under the same ownership as the Decker Zorba's) once, last Fall. A cousin who knew I enjoyed eating at the Decker restaurant was coming to town with her kids to do some shopping, and suggested we have dinner at the Decker place. By that time, it was only open for lunch, and I knew she was going to be hitting Circuit City, so I suggested the Two Notch Zorba's.

Going in, I got the vibe of a place in trouble. Not really anything I could put my finger on at first, but on the way over, I had been getting in the mood for some Spanakopita, and when we got our menus, I saw that there wasn't a single Greek dish listed. For a Greek/Italian restaurant, the total absence of the Greek half seemed like it was probably a recent development, and not a good one. To be clear, the food I ended up ordering was perfectly acceptable -- the choices were just not what one would expect from a restaurant called Zorba's.

When I was out getting a video card at Office Depot a while back, I saw that the place had closed. Judging from the holiday snowflakes still hung in the windows, I'm guessing they probably didn't reopen after Christmas. The window note suggests that at one time the owners were considering options for the building, but the realty sign out front implies that nothing materialized. I'm not sure there is now anwhere closer to Forest Acres than Grecian Gardens out on Sunset for spanakopita..

UPDATE 7 Oct 2010 -- Work is advancing to reopen this building as a Buffalo WIld Wings:

UPDATE 23 Dec 2010 -- The Buffalo Wild Wings is now open:

This building, not technically a Columbia Mall outparcel since it is not reachable from the mall perimeter road, has had several tenants. Right now it is a Verizion store, but at some point in the 1990s, it was Coconuts Music.

Coconuts was a fairly generic CD store, and really the only reason to have gone at all was the location, which was fairly close to my parents' house (I was living out of Columbia by then). On the other hand, Sounds Familar on Parklane was not that much farther, and when I was in town, I was just as likely to end up on the Manifest side of town anyway. So, what i'm leading up to saying is that my own personal boycott of Coconuts did not cause me any great hassle or inconvenience.

The way it happened, as I recall now, is that I had heard some great song on the radio by a band I had never heard of. When I got to Coconuts, I found that this band had in fact been around for a while and had five or six albums out. No problem, I thought, I'll just read the track lists and I remember enough of the lyrics to figure it out. So I pulled out one CD and flipped it over. Huh. There was one of those metal spiral anti-theft, ring-the-buzzer, stickers on back. A big one. Right on the track listings. Well, OK, there's three of this CD, try another. Same thing. Try one of the other albums. Same thing. Every darn CD I looked at had a huge sticker all over the track listings.

I brought this to the attention of the manager, and the response was basically That's the way we do things here.

I decided that wasn't the way places I shopped did things, started a boycott, and a few years later they were gone.

Nowdays, of course, I can just google as much of the lyric as I can rember, find the track and artist and have it from Amazon Prime in two days without leaving my house. (Yes, I could just order the MP3 from Amazon and have it immediately, but I still like having the CDs for backup purposes).

It seems to me that a number of Jamacian or Caribbean restaurants have come and gone in the past few years. I'm somewhat curious about the cusine since my impression is that it is spicy, but since the only specific dish I hear of often is "Jerk Chicken", and I don't eat chicken, I've never gotten around to trying one. I believe before this restaurant, the building housed El Menchaca Mexican Restaurant for many years. I'm not sure what happened here to make the building unsafe. The windows are too grimy to see much inside, so I'm not sure if it was a fire or what.

UPDATE 21 July 2011: Finally got around to adding El Menchaca and full street address to the post title!

Wow, this one comes as a surprise. If you've read many of these posts, you'll know I hate to shop for clothes, but Goody's was one of the places in Columbia I knew I could go and find the Arrow shirts I like (they look OK, and I know what size will actually fit and I can buy a bunch without the hassle of trying them on). In fact, as I took these pictures, I was wearing a shirt I had bought there.

The last time I was in there, last summer I believe, they seemed to be doing a brisk business, and with that and their mammoth building, I had thought them to be pretty solid. Now with it empty, it makes me wonder what the real-estate owners can find to fill it up. They may have to subdivide.

UPDATE 25 May 2010: Changed post title to reflect stores full offical name and full street address.

UPDATE 13 Sep 2010 -- Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts is now in this building:

I always considered Pizza Inn kind of a down-market cousin to Pizza Hut, at least in the beginning. Given my declining respect for Pizza Hut, I might reverse that opinion now -- Pizza Inn never tried to serve me fountain ice tea rather than fresh brewed. At any rate, while it may not have been my first choice, I never had a problem going to Pizza Inn, and I recall going to this one on Two Notch (now a Honey Baked Ham store) several times.

The most memorable time was the night my sister and I had dinner with one of my cousins and her husband. We had been seated with no incident, and had negotiated amongst ourselves a suitable mix of toppings for a large pan pizza. For whatever reason, when the server finally came, my cousin's husband placed our order:

"We'd like a large pan pizza with pepperoni, onions, bell-peppers and mushrooms", he said.

"It's not ready yet", the sever said.

There was a full stop while we all kind of looked at each other.

"Um, yes, we know, um, we'd like a large pan pizza with pepperoni, onions, bell-peppers and mushrooms", he tried again.

"It's not ready yet", the server said.

Another full stop.

"No, no, we're not asking about an order, we just got here, this is our order. We'd like a large --"

"It's not ready yet"

Final full stop.

"Ok, we understand that it's not ready. If we order it, will we get it?

At this point things kind of dissolved in mutual incomprehension and finally a manager had to come over and sort things out. As well as I can remember it, what the server had been trying to get across in a completely unhelpful and inarticulate way (and he was a native English speaker!) was that the crusts for large pan pizzas had not yet risen to the point of being cookable. We got two mediums and all was well despite a suspicion that Allen Funt must be around the corner somewhere.

UPDATE 23 Aug 2009: OK, in the comments this place has been identified as having originally been a Sambo's, and I was able to verify that today in old phonebooks at the RCPL. 7451 Two Notch first shows up as a Sambo's in 1978, and is listed for the last time in the 1981 phonebook. Pizza Inn at this location shows up first in the 1983 phonebook. Given that phonebooks only come out once a year, and require a good bit of advance notice, the building was probably not vacant long, despite not being listed as either store in the 1982 phonebook.

I don't know what finally happened to the Sambo's chain, but at one time they got a good bit of bad publicity by being associated with the Little Black Sambo story. As I recall, their response was that one of the chain's owners was "Sam" something and the other was "Beau" something and thus the name. That's plausible, but once having thought of a name, they did go on to associate it with the story by having a little Indian kid and a tiger in their logo (which I forgot to scan), and of course the story was set in India to begin with, and "Sambo" was actually a hero, having run the tiger into butter somehow (I'm a bit vague on the details now), but nonetheless in the US the story had gotten racist associations over the years, and if you're in business it's better to cut your losses and change your name than fight that kind of battle.

The Byte Shop was Columbia's first computer store, or at least that's the way I remember it. You may have been able to get a TRS-80 at Radio Shack by the time The Byte Shop opened, but Radio Shack was not a computer store.

The place opened in the late 70s, and was very much an Apple shop basing their product line, if I recall correctly, around the Apple IIc. I was in high school at the time, and was, in theory, very much interested in computers. In practice, I knew nothing about them, and had no real way to learn anything. I recall that one of my classmates had a TRS-80 and bought it to school for a presentation in science class. Everyone was fascinated, but looking back, I don't think the machine actually did anything. I think there was a BASIC program which asked a few number questions and computed an answer and that was about it.

A few years after that, one of my friends got an Apple IIc with with a logo interpreter and learned how to write programs using the language's turtle graphics which I thought was amazingly neat. It was out of the question given my total lack of money at the time that I would get a computer, but eventually I did take a "continuing education" class at USC that involved using a statistical analysis program to massage numbers we entered on punch cards and produce ASCII (EBCIDIC, actually..) "graphs" on green and white fanfold line-printer paper. Luckily, this did not quite kill my interest in computers though it came close.

In 1979, VisiCalc for the Apple became the first electronic spreadsheet, and suddenly there was a reason to buy personal computers other than the fact that they were "neat". As displays improved, and daisy-wheel printers became available, word processing provided another reason.

I was only actually in The Byte Shop once that I can recall. After I started college and picked a Computer Science major, I became enamored with the ease of writing with text editors and text processors (the names vi and nroff will be familiar to some..) and convinced my sister that she ought to look into getting a computer for word processing. I still didn't have a computer of my own because I had easy access to school computers, and didn't actually know that much about personal computers, but I think I had in mind that an Apple II with an 80 column CPM card would be a good platform for Wordstar.

I think that when we went to The Byte Shop, she was willing to be talked into a purchase, but in the event it didn't happen because of the staff. Now anyplace can have a bad day, and perhaps we just walked in on theirs, but the staff that day struct me as actively rude. First we were ignored totally for a good while, and then when someone deigned to talk to us, and I started to explain the capabilities were were looking for, the reaction I got was more or less If you don't know exactly what you want to buy, why are you here?. Now I'm a doormat in these situations, but after a few minutes of this, my sister got her dudgeon up and we walked out and never went back. In the end, we waited another year, I learned a bit more about PCs (and IBM compatibles started to appear) and I set her up with a Leading Edge Model-D with NewWord and a Brother daisy-wheel printer from Softek. After using that for a surprising number of years, she did eventually end up with an Apple (Mac), but not from The Byte Shop, which had anyway gone out of business in the interim.

I had completely forgotten that the original location of The Byte Shop was on Fire Lane Drive. When I was taking pictures of the old Taylor's Restaurant the other day, I saw a building down past the firehouse with a kind of new-agey mural. I had noticed it off and on when I would go to Lowes, and it had always seemed to be empty. I got to wondering what kind of place it had been, walked over, saw the nameplate on the front stoop, and it all came back to me (though the mural may postdate The Byte Shop).

There's currently a builder's permit on the building, and some sort of renovation is going on, so perhaps something new may show up here. On the other hand, the permit is more than a year old, so I wouldn't hold my breath. I'm not sure if the horseshoe pitch dates from The Byte Shop era, or if they firestation next door unwinds there. The final picture is the Two Notch location where, I believe, The Byte Shop ended its tenure.

UPDATE 22 March 2010: Added full street addresses to post title, and added some tags.

Commenter Dennis sends this picture noting:

There was a Yogi Bear's at the corner of Two Notch & Decker. Where K-Mart's parking lot is.

This sign is actually in Hartsville, and the store there is about the last one in the US. The one in Columbia had a sign identical to this one.

I don't recall this place in Columbia; I know several things have come onto that K-Mart corner though. The one in Hartsville I have seen many times -- we drive by it on the way to visit our cousins there. I believe they still prefer the chicken there over other larger brands like KFC and Church's.

UPDATE 22 June 2010 -- I get a lot of hits looking for Yogi Bear's Honey Fried Chicken. Just for fun, here are two pictures (like Dennis's above) from what I believe is the last Yogi Bear's still in operation. It's located in Hartsville South Carolina at 514 South 5th Street:

UPDATE 11 August 2022: Added the new picture at the top of the post which was sent in by Jimmy Freeman who says: "[ ] as you can see...... it was located in Winn Dixie shopping center next to that bank. When Columbia Mall was built, Winn Dixie was moved". This is actually a bit differently located than I had remembered it. Big thanks to Jimmy!

I'm also adding a map icon based on the location of Baker's Sports Pub, which seems to be pretty close to where this was.

UPDATE 12 November 2024: Commenter Aaron J. provides this link to an old The State want-ad establishing the address of Yogi Bear's as 7139 Two Notch. I will update the post title from "Two Notch at Parklane" to that number and update the map icon and tags. The ad also establishes that the place was open into late 1971 at least, so I will update the date from the vague "1960s" to the vague "1970s". Also note that the streets in that area have been reworked so much that having the actual street address may not say exactly where that address was back in the day.

The Spring Valley Theaters were on Two Notch Road near I-20, where the Lowes now is. In order to build the place, they first tore down The Dreamland Motel, one of the stalwart US-1 motels, and where both my sister and I had swimming lessons once upon a time. I'm not sure why the place got the "Spring Valley" tag. Certainly it was closer to Spring Valley than, say, The Statehouse, was but "closer" isn't "close".

I know we saw a number of films at the theater, but one in particular stands out in my mind. It was 1977, and I was 16 years old. I finally had my unrestricted license, and I could drive by myself and at night. My pure unbridled freedom was marred only by my total lack of money, and my total lack of a car.

Earlier in the day, I had been listening to the radio. I'm not sure which station it was. I was still listening to WIS a good bit, but I had discovered rock & roll in 1976, so it could have been WNOK. Whichever it was, they were running a call-in contest. I used to try these quite often, and won several. (I won a ride on the first run of the Thunder Road roller coaster at Carowinds, a chance to meet Foreigner backstage, tickets to see The Beach Boys and a couple of free meals).

This particular contest was for tickets to a sneak-preview of a new science fiction movie, one I had never heard of. I had enjoyed written science fiction for years, and had seen my share of SF movies, both first run and on TV. I guess the "biggies" were 2001, which was visualy impressive, but ponderous and confusing, Silent Running, which was visually impressive but based on a silly concept and The Planet of the Apes movies which were less effect laden, but more fun. As it happened, I was caller number five, and I talked my parents into letting me drive myself to the show. So, I was out tooling around Two Notch in our 1972 Comet coupe and having a good time, actually getting to use the headlights as the sun went down.

I got over to the Spring Valley Theaters, showed my ID which was checked against a namelist (I think -- I'm a bit fuzzy on that), and went on in. I didn't have any money to buy popcorn or a drink, so I just went in and sat down. I also didn't have any great expectations and from what I could tell, the other winners didn't either, but I was quite prepared to have a good time, and to not be in any hurry driving home.

Of course the movie was Star Wars. I had never seen anything like it -- nobody there had. It's hard to remember what movies were like in the 70s, but "fun" was optional and present in a fairly small subset. Take a movie like The Great Waldo Pepper which should have been fun what with the chances for stunts and dogfights, but decided to go another way.

This film had the effects of 2001 -- heck it had better effects than 2001! -- and decided to be fun! I had never heard an audience applaud at the end of a film before, but they did, and I did too. Leaving the theater, I knew this film was going to be huge, and in fact after it opened, it was weeks before you could get a ticket. Not only was Star Wars a bright spot in the decade of stagflation, but it totally changed the way we see movies by paving the way for "the summer blockbuster". Now, that has had good effects and bad ones, but I sure wouldn't want to go back to "70s" films!

I forget exactly when the place was torn down. I believe it was the 80s, but it could have been the 90s, I suppose. At the time, Columbia was over-theatered, so it wasn't a painful loss, but I'll never forget that night!