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The two little mall stores where 90s kids pressed their faces to the glass: Babbage's with its wall of shrink-wrapped PC boxes and Nintendo cartridges, Electronics Boutique with the demo kiosk and the clerk who had already beaten everything. Both of them became GameStop.
The mall store where you bought the Beat It jacket, the parachute pants and then the Cross Colours: a Baltimore chain that rode every fad from 1968 to nearly 1,500 stores and a billion dollars in sales, bet on hip-hop just as the mall went grunge, and liquidated in 1996.
The yellow-sign discount shoe chain where you found your own size on the self-service racks. By the late '90s it was in all 50 states, with thousands of stores, and it lasted long enough to prank influencers with a fake luxury boutique.
The bookstore in every mall, where paperbacks, magazines and calendars met a kid's allowance — more than a thousand stores at the peak, and a Preferred Reader card nearly five million people signed up for in its first year. The superstores ate it from the inside.
The five-and-dime with the lunch counter, the sewing notions, the greeting cards and the china, the store downtown that had been there since your grandmother's day. In July 1997 the company announced it was closing the last 400 U.S. stores, and downtown never quite got them back.