Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Tweeter was a Circuit City-like store on Harbison Boulevard in a Columbiana Center outparcel. I only went in the place once, and I'm afraid that it worked itself onto "not a great place" list for reasons mostly (but not entirely) beyond the staff's control. I forget exactly what I was looking for, or if it was just browsing, but the store was fairly crowded, and apparently a salesman at the car stereo speaker kiosk had just been asked by a customer to put in the customer's CD to see what it would sound like on the Tweeter's speakers. Mistake: suddenly the entire store was filled with the loudest possible Gonna F*** my B**** after I slap her up rap song imagineable. There were several parents with kids in the store and I saw them cringe. Granted the staff was blindsided, but they should either have thought about incidents like that beforehand, or at least have acted more swiftly in the event. I have no problem with whatever you listen to, but there are times and places.

Anyway, the whole chain went bankrupt in 2008 according to Wikipedia. I don't know why, but apparently there's not a lot of space in that area of retail. Even the #2 store failed, so I guess it's not a surprise that stores further down the food chain couldn't make it either.

UPDATE 1 March 2010: Sky City also has a post on this Tweeter.

UPDATE 6 January 2012 -- As noted by commenter Andrew, this (drastically remodelled) building is now open as Jared The Galleria Of Jewelry:

Here's another furnishings store going under. Village Furniture is way out on Two Notch (to the point that its just called Highway 1). It's technically in Elgin, but not what I think of as Elgin -- more like "Pontiac-plus". Anyway it's right past County Line Pottery (which looks exactly as it did 35 years ago..) over the county line into Kershaw County.

I don't know anything about the store, but I'll hazard a guess that it's a casualty of the housing bust. I admire the bang-up job they're doing on their closing signage. It must have been depressing to do, but its quite eye-catching and effective.

(Hat tip to Have Your Say commenter "Veign")

The UPS Store at Trenholm Plaza made the move across the parking lot from the Holligan's wing to the Post Office side near the new Italian restaurant. It rejoins former neighbor Foilline Vision Center there, leaving Holligan's as the only business still operating on the outer edge of the plaza. At one time I had heard Holligan's was to move into the old Rogers Brothers spot, then I had heard it was going into the old Coldstone location. Unless the property owners have changed their mind about tearing down that wing, it will have to go somewhere.

I find it a little interesting that the UPS store is now so close to the Post Office. In theory, they are competitors, and strip malls often have "no compete" clauses that play into who they will lease to. I remember an interesting news story about a court forced to rule if a "burrito" was a "sandwich" to decide if a property owner had broken a promise to a sandwich shop not to allow another sandwich shop in. Of course Trenholm Plaza has always been weird that way. They have two grocery stores, and essentially two "Hallmark" stores.

UPDATE 29 November 2011: The old location is to be a Cafe Caturra.

I was going to Panera Bread the other day, and noticed that this Advance Auto Parts store in an outparcel of the Garners Ferry Road K-Mart was gone. Actually, the day I noticed it, one of those fly-by-night sofa sales operations had set up shop in the parking lot (which is well located for access and visibility). The door sign optimistically states "closed temporarily", but we shall see. Interestingly (or not :-) this place is just catty-cornered across the street from the NAPA Auto Parts store I wrote about a while back.

And as a special added bonus, the historical marker for "Camp Jackson", which is in the store parking lot:

UPDATE 18 March 2009:

Well, looks like I took those pictures just in time. I went by on 12 March, and they had already knocked the whole place down (except for the front steps) and were digging a honking big hole where it was. So far the historic plaque is untouched.

UPDATE 17 Dec 2010: Fixed the post title to indicate "Devine Street" rather than "Garners Ferry Road". Added a second picture of the new store.

UPDATE 5 October 2009: The new store is built and open:

UPDATE 17 Dec 2010: Changed post title to indicate Devine Street rather than Garners Ferry Road. Added another picture of the new store.

UPDATE 4 April 2022: Updating tags, adding map icon.

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a La-Z-Boy, as did two aunts. We kids always loved to get into them, lever out the footrest and throw ourselves backwards, listening to the chair ratchet up. When my sister moved out, she got one for herself, and I finally took the opportunity to get one for myself a few years ago.

In the event, I find that I spend more time sitting in front of this computer than in my comfortable recliner, but still it's nice to finally have a good chair. I picked it out at this outlet on Forest Drive, just down from Trenholm Plaza heading towards Fort Jackson, and they delivered and assembled it with no drama. There were a number of contractors working in the building today, so I suppose it is going to have a new life as something though I didn't see any indication as to what. I'm also not sure what happened to La-Z-Boy itself. I'd guess another casualty of the housing crash -- you most often need new furniture for a new house, otherwise you can live with the pieces you have for a while longer.

UPDATE 20 April 2009:

As Mrs. SK notes below, Tuesday Morning is here.

It's interesting that they came back this close to Trenholm Plaza. That makes me guess they were shown the door there as part of the plaza upgrade rather than just not being viable there as I had initially thought.

UPDATE 18 May 2023: Updating tags and adding map icon.

I suppose I shouldn't do two Eckerd Drugs posts so close together, but writing about the one on Taylor Street made me think about the one at Dutch Square, and I already had the pix, so why not?

The Eckerd's at Dutch Square is the only Eckerd's I know of which had a lunch counter. Even at the time Dutch Square was built in the early 70s, drugstore lunch counters were on the way out, but I suppose they figured they had a captive audience and plenty of foot traffic, like an old downtown, plus there was no food court at the time (I believe Chik-Fil-A, Annabelle's and a cafeteria were the only restaurants in the mall).

The layout of this store was a bit unusual. I have taken the pictures catty-cornered because that was the way the store was oriented. You can see that the current tenant, The Dress Barn has an entrance on both the main up-and-down corridor of the mall and on the cross corridor leading to a mall entrance on the Dutch Square Boulevard side of the mall. So did Eckerd's, with the lunch counter being situated crossways such that if you walked in through the main corridor entrance and out through the cross corridor entrance, you would have walked across the whole lunch counter space parallel to the counter.

Between the lunch counter area and the main store proper, there was a silver turnstile which only allowed passage in not out, which I always considered an unfriendly touch, but I suppose it helped with shoplifting since there was no store checkout on the lunch counter side (the store entrance with registers was on the cross-corridor near the mall door).

There was also an Eckerd's in Columbia Mall, and I'm unsure which store packed it in first, but I'm pretty sure the Dutch Square one did not make it out of the 1990s.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags.

Well, that was a bit sooner than I had expected. For some reason, I was thinking that the Sounds Familiar flagship store on Rosewood was staying open through February, but when I went over there on the 26th, the place was already closed and emptied out. I've written about Sounds Familiar before, here and here. I guess over the years, I was in this store the most, though the Myrtle Beach store was probably my favorite. The last thing I specifically recall buying here was the ABBA Gold greatest hits collection sometime last summer -- used. I know I bought a good bit of beach music here including some ripete LPs, (For the longest time, that was the only way to get Lamont Dozier's Cool Me out though it is finally on CD now), and some interesting "import" CDs (though they basically stopped carrying those in later years).

The counter "podium" was an interesting feature of this store. The area where the registers, CD players and computers were was raised about a foot off the store floor on a wooden platform which is still there. The only reason I can think of for doing such a thing is so the staff could keep an eagle eye out for "shrinkage", but the effect was such that when you picked out your CDs, it was like approaching the throne: Oh please, your majesties couldst thou smilest down on me that I might purchase these graven disks of recorded sounds?

I haven't checked out the place being advertised in the window signs, and am not sure what the connection with Sounds Familiar is, if any. At any rate, the closing of this store marks the end of a local success story (20+ years is a pretty good run!), and puts us one step closer to the end of the "music store" era.

Read the rest of this entry »

From what I understand, Eckerd was long an arm of J. C. Penny, which was looking to dump the thing for years before it was able to. That notwithstanding, Eckerd went on a building spree in Columbia a few years before the chain was finally taken over by Rite-Aid.

This included building a number of new stores which went under even before the take-over was in the works, and this building, at 1720 Taylor Street (between the train tracks and the old Big-T) was one of them. My memory is that it closed down almost as soon as it opened, though that may be something of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if it was caught in the chain's problems, or just not a viable location. Dollar General proves retail can work in that spot, but Eckerd's was a bit pricier.

UPDATE 15 May 2011: Changed closing date in post title to April 2000 based on commenter Andrew's research.

UPDATE 10 August 2020: Add map icon, update tags

The picture isn't very good because the sun was against me, but Jack's was a local shoe store on Sunnyside Drive (which is a side street off of Forest Drive, just past Richland Mall heading towards town). The site is now either Miyo's or Leapin' Lizards -- I can't recall exactly which space it was. Growing up, we shopped for shoes in a number of places, including Gerber's at Trenholm Plaza and the shoe departments at Sears and other department stores, but I think Jack's is where we most often ended up.

I remember in particular, that Jack's was the place I got my first pair of Sebago Docksides, a shoe so comfortable that I have worn them ever since and that would be over 30 years now. In fact, that was about the only place in town I could find them. Now I either have to get them in Charleston, or order them from amazon.com (which is OK since my feet stay the same size now).

I've written about Sounds Familiar before, as the chain has been contracting ever since the digital age started. This particular store, in Myrtle Beach a couple of miles above Myrtle Square Mall, was my favorite location. It was not as large as the Rosewood or Parklane stores, but for some reason, the selection seemed to skew slightly more to stuff that caught my eye than other SF locations. For one thing, this store seemed to be the boldest in the chain as far as stocking "import" CDs went. I know I bought a number of Beach Boys / Brian Wilson "imports" there over the years including the imfamous Pet Sounds stereo sampler. Also, as might be expected for the Myrtle Beach store, they had a very good selection of "beach music" (which has no connection to The Beach Boys [other than a Carl Wilson solo song "What You Do To Me" having a brief run on the beach music charts]). In fact the whole chain had excellent beach music sections due to owning the Ripete record label, but beach music in the Myrtle Beach store was always stocked in depth.

One of my favorite touches at this store encapsulates both why I liked the place, and why the chain eventually failed -- someone had taped a faded cartoon to the cash register there. It probably came from a record-store trade magazine originally, and had a customer asking a record-store counter clerk Can you special order this out of print record for me? with the clerk responding Yes! And I can raise the dead as well.

I liked the attitude that pasted up that cartoon -- willing to poke a bit of fun at customers without the fear that someone's nose would be put out of joint. But the fact was that by several years before the store closed, any customer could special order an out of print CD from Amazon or elsewhere, and the record-store business model just didn't make sense anymore.