Service Merchandise
The catalog showroom where you wrote item numbers on a slip, paid at the counter, and waited by the conveyor belt for your order to roll out of the back. More than 400 stores at its peak, gone by 2002.
#Defunct Chains
2 items
The Nature Company & Natural Wonders
The two mall stores of rain sticks, geodes, telescopes and nature-sounds CDs, with a stone archway and a fountain out front and New Age music somewhere in the ceiling. The Nature Company built the formula in Berkeley, Natural Wonders copied it, and the Discovery Channel Store and a bankruptcy court finished both.