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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.
Gap's cheaper little sibling, born in 1994 with shopping carts in the aisles, Performance Fleece for the whole family, and commercials in which a fashion editor in enormous glasses declared everything "Fabulous!" beside a dog named Magic.
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.
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.