Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Commenter Melanie found these matchbook images from a place I have no memory of. 4610 Devine Street does not currently exist. Ruby Tuesday is at 4600 Devine Street, and Checkmax Payday Advance is at 4624 Devine Street. I know they have done a lot of work in the past on the streets in this area. I believe 4610 must have been torn down to make the entrance street into the new-ish plaza which houses Ruby Tuesday, Staples and Bi-Lo (I know the Pizza Hut in that area was torn down). In fact, if that street had been there originally, you would expect Ruby Tuesday and Checkmax to have different block numbers. (As an aside, I'm a little surprised to find that these are all Devine addresses -- I had thought that Garners Ferry started here, but in fact it's apparently at Rosewood).

Anyway, it's obvious from the matchbook that this place was one of the adult book stores which have been in various parts of Columbia since the late 60s, I suppose. In fact, Fort Jackson Boulevard which runs into Devine in this area used to have a number of racy operations.

Hat Tip: Melanie

Does Kmart even have a business stragegy anymore? Fabian tactics work if your opponnent needs to keep sending home for men, money and elephants, none of which is the case for Wal Mart, whose new store on the site of the old Bush RIver Mall doomed this Kmart location. If your strategy is "close a store whenever Wal Mart opens one", you might as well just turn the lights off now. I remember the bluelight.com strategy during the dot-com bubble, and the Martha Stewart strategy before she went to jail, but what is it now?

Hardee's decided to not go head-on with or try to out-McDonald McDonald's with their "Thickburger" campaign, and seem to have gotten some traction with it. Target seems to have found a viable "almost as cheap as Wal Mart, but nicer" strategy, why can't Kmart? You would think that after all the effort and money they spent buying Sears they could leverage that brand somehow, or they could always rebrand their stores with the historic and fondly remembered S. S. Kresge nameplate and try to refocus that way.

I've never run so much as a hot-dog cart, so I can't pretend to know the answer, if indeed there is one, but keeping old looking, poorly stocked stores like this one open without any refits until Wal Mart moves in isn't it!

I suppose it wouldn't bother me except I have a certain residual fondness for Kmart since we shopped a good bit there while I was growing up. Mostly it was the Two Notch or Fort Jackson stores, but if we were on the right side of town, it could be this one as well. Kmart is the only store I've ever been lost in, the store I brought my first LP in (The Beach Boys 2-disc "Endless Summer" for $5.25) and the first place I would go when shopping on my own if I ever needed a hammer or a light bulb or anything like that. I even remember the old-style "Blue Light Specials" where they would literally drag a flashing blue light cart to the shelves with the special promotion items.

Oh well, or as the clerks used to be remided with a sticker on the register: TYFSAK.

UPDATE 19 Aug 2009 -- Well, I guess they do have a stragegy:

or perhaps it's just a hope, "Savings Are Here to Stay". And I'm pretty sure that's not how to spell Arrowwood.

UPDATE 14 Septmber 2009: Added an older, but better hilltop picture above.

UPDATE 9 November 2009:

Well the store finally closed yesterday evening. As it happened, I was in the area having had lunch at Fuddruckers, so I stopped by. The store was basically operating out of a small square area in front that was formed with walls of shelving moved to semi-enclose the space. They weren't actually keeping people out of the back part of the store, just indicating that there was nothing to buy back there, so I walked around behind the area to get some pictures of the vast empty spaces.

As the final half hour of the store's life started, the announcer came on and said that everything was now 95% off. I hadn't really planned to buy anything, and indeed there wasn't much left to buy, but anytime there's a 95% off sale, some sort of "There must be something I can use" reflex kicks in, and I started actually looking on the shelves.

In the event, I found some of those electrical sockets that you screw into edison-base light fixtures to make them into electrical outlets -- something I need every ten years or so, and got a number of those. I also picked up some of those "make one phone jack into two phone jacks" plugs, a Rand McNally map, and some sort of Disney Hannah Montanna memory card that claims to have songs on it though I'm not even sure I have a reader for that format.

As I was checking out, the announcer was saying, "and if you know anyone who's hiring, let your cashier know", which was sad, but I suppose very appropos.

After I left, I went over to Dutch Square for a little while then came to the parking lot to take an exterior picture of the storefront and roadside sign. Then it occurred to me to drive up to the Dutch Square parking lot again, and take a few shots from the hill over Hardee's.

The blue-light is now dark.

UPDATE 22 August 2012 -- As mentioned by commenter Andrew, something is going on at this old Kmart. The front doors have been boarded up, but with a new access, and there are construction dumpsters out front. I don't know if the Remington College poster on the building indicates that they will be expanding from across the parking lot into this building or if they just leased the right to hang a billboard for their operation (in the OfficeMax) there. At any rate, there is no visible construction permit to give any better idea of what is happening:

UPDATE 1 October 2012 -- Construction is going on:

UPDATE 7 October 2019: Add map icon, update tags.

I noticed this empty car lot a week or so ago as I was driving down North Main towards Sunset. It's really a pretty good sized property, and looks to have shut down fairly recently, as the soft drink machine is still there, but that's just a guess. I really like all the flags and banners that car lots have. Unfortunately this was an overcast day, so they don't look that great here.

You've got to love the (possibly misplaced in this case) optimism of car lots too:

Right Cars! Right Price! Right Now!

OK, I'll admit that I'm not 100% sure that the Asian Market on Diamond Lane is the same one that opened recently across from Dutch Square at 1221 Bakersfield Road, but given the timing and the same marquee description, I think it's a pretty good bet (and I'm sure someone will set me straight otherwise).

I used to notice this place when I would cut through the mostly dead Intersection Center to see what remained and marvel that it was still in business. I guess part of that is that it's a destination -- if you need something that's historically exotic to SC and that you can't just hop-to-the-pig for, it doesn't matter if the store is off the beaten track. Still, I was glad to see them move to a better location. (Though believe it or not, a few stores are still have their doors open on Diamond Lane!). I got the Hong Chang Hang part of the name from here, as Chinese is Greek to me :-)

I was a bit surprised to see the address of the new store as Bakersfield Road -- if you had asked me I would have said the street was Dutch Square Boulevard all the way from Broad River Road to Bush River Road.

UPDATE 22 January 2020: Update tags, add map icon.

I find this Rite Aid closing interesting because it happened so soon after the conversion from Eckerd's, so in 2007, they paid a lot of money to redo all the signage and branding, interior and exterior, and then in 2009, closed the store.

I think it was a classy touch to transfer the store's perscriptions across the street to their competitors at CVS rather than sending customers to a Rite Aid further away. I hope the building can be re-used, it's still fairly new and appears quite nice.

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The last time I posted about a car lot, it was one which had gone under on Two Notch Road, as have several others I've posted about here. This one has actually moved to Two Notch, albeit to a tonier area out near The Village at Sandhill.

In fact, Broad River Road itself seems a bit like the distressed stretch of Two Notch Road. It's hard to think of a part of it that's doing really well. With the almost total demise of Intersection Center and the decline of Dutch Square the whole corridor is hurting. The part with the new Food LIon down towards Greystone seems to be doing OK, and maybe way out in Irmo there are some thriving areas, but it seems like a major road with such good Interstate access (I-20 direct, I-26 from Bush River & St. Andrews Road, I-126 from Greystone) should be doing better.

UPDATE 4 March 2010 -- It's now Pro Bowl Motors:

I already wrote about the S & K closing at the Two Notch Road store, so I don't have a lot to say about the Bush River Road closing. I'm still happy with the belt I got at the other store and didn't need to go inside this location, which is good as it was late Sunday and closed anyway.

I will say that if I were going too keep one Columbia store and close the other, I would keep Two Notch and close this one based solely on parking and ease of access. This little strip (which also contains a closed Sounds Familar location) is at the corner of Bush River Road and Colonial Life Boulevard. There is no parking on the Bush River side, and it's not great on the Colonial Life side. Of course, they are closing both stores so the point is moot.

UPDATE 4 June 2012 -- It's now Fashion's Unlimited:

Here's another empty car lot on Two Notch Road (this one is near Beltline). It would be interesting to count them all up some time. If you include Beltline and Decker, I'm sure you could get around a dozen. On the other hand, new ones pop up, and old ones come back, so it's not all doom and gloom.

UPDATE 30 Sep 2010 -- Well, they've knocked down the building now:

UPDATE 25 Feb 2011 -- Well, the new building on this spot is going up pretty quickly. It seems to have car service bays:

UPDATE 11 September 2011 -- It's a car-wash, and it's open:

Well, that will teach me a lesson.

Reed's Jewelers was on the upper level of Columbia Mall, just out the door from Macy's heading towards Sears. I don't own any jewelery, but I do have a watch which needs a battery change about once a year. The last time it stopped running, I went by Reed's to have the battery replaced, and made the mistake of letting the salesman upsell me the "lifetime" battery change option. Sure it was a few dollars more, but they would continue to change it every year for the life of the watch at no additional charge.

I should have suspected that the life of the watch would be longer than the life of the store..

I've written about Waldenbooks at Columbia Mall, and the other book store at Dutch Square Browz-a-Bit, but I've not said anything about the Dutch Square Waldenbooks, which for several years was my main book store.

Waldenbooks actually had two different locations in Dutch Square. The first one was sort of odd in that it was behind the corner of the main corridor and the first crosswalk, but not on the corner. There were two entrances to the store. One was on the crosswalk corrider before coming to the corner (where the Great Steak & Potato Co is today) and the other was on the main corridor just below Tapps (now the theaters), but the actual corner, Steak & Potato slot was another store.

The main corridor also goes markedly up hill from the crosswallk to Tapps, so the Walden's was a split-level store. If you call the crosswalk entrance the "front" (and that makes sense as they later closed off the exit to the main corridor), then the front of the store was on the ground and the back of the store was built on a platform that was, I believe, two steps up from the ground. My main interest was the science fiction rack, which was parallel to the main corridor and butted up against the raised platform forming the back of the store.

For at least one year, possibly two, I would spend one afternoon a week in the Dutch Square area while my mother would take my sister to piano lessons a couple of miles away. I had only a $0.60 weekly allowance, supplemented by $3.00 for mowing the lawn, so any actual purchase was a matter of careful deliberation and agonized tax calculation and penny counting (though it certainly helped that mass market paperbacks were still under a dollar in those years). In my hour or so of time, I would sometimes walk down to Boardwalk Plaza to peruse the Book Dispensary, but mainly I would circulate between Walden's and Browz-A-Bit trying to make up my mind.

I have strong memories of some of the books I bought at this Walden's (and in fact still have the books themselves in most cases). I recall in particular getting all of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, one at a time, with awful 70s covers, and Pyramid editions of all of Doc Smith's Skylark and Lensman books (with bad [what was it with the 70s and loss of design sense?!] but better covers as well). Covers aside, I must have read each of those books at least 20 times.

I also liked the humor section though I rarely bought anything there. One book in particular made a great impression on me as a 13 or 14 year old. I was amazed that it sat right out there in the open, and always wished I had the courage to pick it up. Buying it was out of the question, of course :-)

Later when I could drive on my own, Columbia Mall became my book hangout of choice what with Walden's on one end and B. Dalton on the other. I sort of lost track of the Dutch Square Walden's. I did know they had moved down the main corridor from their original location. The reason I heard was that the split-level store was not ADA compatible, but I don't know if that is true or not. At any rate, I found their new location less interesting than the original. What with that, moving out of town and the advent of "big box" bookstores, I doubt I was in the new store more than a dozen or so times. I didn't even hear about it when the store closed.

After Walden's, Fashion's Unlimited went into their slot, and I find it amusing to see how they stock the men's dress shirts in the old Walden's magazine display rack.