malls

The Remains of the Eighties

For my 18th birthday, I got a $25 gift certificate to Tape World.

It was 1995 and I hadn’t bought a cassette in at least a few years.  But in The Smith Haven Mall, there was still a store called Tape World.  I’d never set foot inside of it and I don’t think anyone I knew had either.  Sam Goody was right around the corner, sitting in prime position across from Aeropostale and The Gap, beckoning music lovers with its neon entrance and posters advertising the latest albums.  Tape World was a blocky ‘80s-lettering sign above a thin store that was tucked between 5-7-9 and The Bombay Company.  I actually had to check the mall directory to find it.

The Eighties didn’t so much end in 1990; rather, they slowly faded into obscurity, and that has me thinking about where they eventually went.  Tape World, for instance, has its place in our cultural examination of the decade, as one of Michael Galinsky’s photos for The Decline of Mall Civilization shows a blonde girl with quintessential mall hair walking by the store and its wood paneling facade.  A look through my memories of the malls near me (and yes, malls, plural–it was Long island) shows a number of places where time seemed to stand still well after the decade had changed over while simultaneously trying to keep up with the times.  Gardiner Manor Mall had an ancient Sears, an Orange Julius, and a bridge to Stern’s.  The South Shore Mall had Captree Corners, a late-1970s mini mart of small shops and a fountain I loved to throw pennies into when I was six.  The Sun Vet Mall was where 1981 went to die.  

Smith Haven, started out as a mid-century mall of the late 1960s with fountains, Alexander Calder sculptures, and the low-lit atmosphere that I associate with the era.  It was a twenty-minute drive from Sayville and when I was little, I loved going to “the mall with the fountains.”  However, it underwent a massive renovation in 1987 and emerged with a brighter neon-tinged and mauve-tiled palette that has come to typify the Eighties. 

The renovation was hyped even as it was going on.  When the mall was getting its makeover, there were radio commercials that sang “We’re building the place of your dreams … Smith Haven Mall!”  Later, the commercials changed to “Your wildest dreams will come true … Smith Haven Mall!”  I don’t know what “wildest dreams” can come true at Jean Country or Casual Corner, but I will take their word for it.  The mall was also the home to a local news special on WLIG 55, “At the Mall With Drew Scott.”  It remains one of the more amazing artifacts of 1980s Long Island as did the mall itself until it underwent another renovation in the mid-2000s.

That’s probably why it’s always stayed alive while so many shopping malls have died.  A hot place in the Eighties, Smith Haven was also a destination for Nineties mall-ness because it had a Gap, Aeropostale, Structure, Express, Limited, Eddie Bauer, Bath and Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, Disney Store, and Warner Brothers Studio Store.  But it was still Eighties building that held onto that part of its identity with stores like Tape World; Sssassy, which was a real-life version of Over Our Heads, the store from the last few seasons of The Facts of Life; and the cutlery store Hoffritz.  Because honestly, nothing is more Eighties than a store devoted entirely to cutlery.

Sssassy in Smith Haven Mall, probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Photo was taken from siteride on Flickr.

The faded Eighties aesthetic in the era of grunge was simultaneously out of place and in line with those who have come to be known as “Xennials”. Stuck between our cool older Generation X and annoying little Millennial siblings, the Xennial microgeneration is the middle child–ignored because mom and dad had already done everything for those older siblings and the younger ones were showing much more promise.  We were raised by people going through the motions, wearing hand-me-downs and finding ourselves too old for anything new.  I don’t think it was spurred on by anything other than bad timing.  We had our peak teenage mall years during the first Bush recession where the economy and the housing market both bottomed out, especially on Long Island, so that meant that development and progress were put on pause and we did our best to use our fading institutions of commerce.

Ironically–appropriate for the Nineties, I know–this made parts of Long Island feel like a museum exhibit.  In recent years, there has been a ton of McMansioning and townhome development.  But in the late 1990s, there was still a lot left over from decades past.  My grandmother’s neighborhood in New Hyde Park had houses that had remained unchanged since the 1950s.  Downtown spaces in Patchogue, Amityville, and Huntington still resembled their 1950s and 1960s selves.  Sayville Pizza looked like it hadn’t been updated since 1975.  Even as a kid, I wondered what ghosts were sending echoes through their halls and walls, and whatever patina or grime covered the Island led me to associate authentic with “worn.”

Of course, such things do not always last, especially when the economy improves and developers can give yet another facelift  to a mall or neighborhood.  The candy-colored late 90s and the housing boom of the 2000s meant knocking down the useless buildings to put up Target (as they did with the Gardiner Manor Mall) or turning a shopping center property into a housing development.  In some cases, the limited space provided by an area in Queens or Nassau County meant a creative way to drop a Barnes & Noble into a strip mall.  In other, like in Suffolk County, you could bulldoze acres of woods to create an outlet mall.  I’m sure nobody really noticed when Rickel and Pergament gave way to Lowes and Home Depot unless someone prompted them.  It’s such a suburban aesthetic to embrace whatever is new.  “They’re putting in a Whole Foods.”  

Yeah, they give us a lot.

Image taken from one of those baitclick T-shirt ads that uses really bad photoshopping. You know the ones.

They’ve even given us the past, preserving the Eighties in places that are comfortable and happy–movies, marathon weekends on radio stations, your kids’ spirit week costumes.  But it’s all cosplay and manufactured nostalgia put forward by those who stand to earn money or cache off of our memories: memes, influencers who pretend they “are Eighties”, bad TikToks of someone bobbing their head and pointing out that random items existed or making lists of cartoons “nobody heard of” yet every single commenter remembers.  Yet, that’s the product of our culture, which is one that has been manufactured for generations.

Tons of ink has been spilled about suburbia, stripping down its vinyl siding to show the flaws underneath andI want to make some pretentious point about how because the Eighties were actually stripped of all substance and repackaged, we are stuck in a cultural Allegory of the Cave and the people who sold us the American Dream are making money off of that, but I’ll just look for where the past has receded and the decade truly remains. Because it’s not a place everyone goes.  It’s in a paragraph of the last chapters of a U.S. history textbook.  It’s documentaries buried underneath a pile of true crime exposés on second-tier streaming services.  It’s in a bin in the attic, the back of a closet, or on the shelves and racks of thrift stores.  

A few months ago, I was in one of those antique malls where people offload things that don’t qualify for an appearance on Antiques Roadshow but still think are worth more than a couple of bucks at a yard sale.  Among stacks of old Corningware, old country albums, military ephemera, and old guitars were a number of video games, baseball cards, toys, and other things I recognized, like a Le Clic, a disk film camera that came in an assortment of colors, all of which screamed Eighties.  These were more comforting than any meme or slapped-together neon wardrobe I’ve seen on a high schooler.  They felt lived in and I could picture some kid with a questionable haircut wearing an Ocean Pacific T-shirt once collecting and playing with all of them.

picture taken from eBay.

In the ten or fifteen minutes I spent in Tape World thirty years ago, I stuck to Eighties music. I’d like to say that a store called Tape World demanded an Eighties music purchase, it was because CDs were expensive and I wanted to get the most out of my $25.  The Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack on CD was just enough to allow me to dive into a bargain bin and fish out The 80s Rock + On, a K-Tel produced 80s compilation cassette that would live in my Walkman or the tape deck of my Hyundai Excel until I offloaded my cassettes in the mid 2000s.  So yes, I did buy a tape at Tape World.

We Wrote the Book on Savings

consumers catalog

The cover of the fall 1991-1992 Consumers catalog. The company stayed in business until the mid-1990s, although my local store was gone by then.

I think that I am at the point in my life where I don’t get upset if I go to the store and something is out of stock.  Oh sure, it’s a minor inconvenience and the solution usually leads to me getting in the car and driving to another, similar store down the road.  But when you are a kid, this is a hard lesson to learn.  You don’t have a car and you don’t know much about the stores in your area beyond what you have seen whenever your parents have taken you, so showing up to TSS only to find out that the action figure you wanted was completely sold out can be absolutely devastating, even if it provides you with much-needed lessons about how you’re not always able to get what you want instantly.  Now, I’m sure that if you ask a number of people in my generation how they learned this lesson, they’ll tell you a variation on the same story–they wanted a toy, they asked mom or dad to take them to the store to get it, it wasn’t there.  Or they may say one word:  “Consumers.”

Consumers was a catalog-based store that was founded in Canada as Consumers Distributing in 1957 and expanded over the course of a couple of decades, adding stores and then buying out other, similar retail outlets, something that helped them to pop up with more frequency during the 1980s.  The idea behind the store was similar to its main competitor, Service Merchandise:  the company published a catalog and then anyone who wanted to buy something from the catalog would head to the local retail outlet–usually at a mall–and pick it up.

That is, if they actually had anything.

The G.I. Joe page of a 1980s Consumers catalog. Photo courtesy of YoJoe.com

The arrival of the Consumers catalog twice a year was an event.  My friends and I would grab it out of the mail and skip right to the toys and games section.  Open before us was a display of everything we ever wanted, from G.I. Joe figures and vehicles to every Nintendo game that we’d ever seen advertised anywhere.  Plus, the prices were much better than what you would get at Toys R Us–not that Toys R Us was overpriced or anything, but any time you can say, “Hey Mom!  The Legend of Zelda is only $45 and not $60!  Can we get it?” you have a better shot at getting what you wanted.

That is, if your parents were completely gullible, which mine were not, but that didn’t stop me from trying.  Unfortunately for those who actually got this ploy to work, going to Consumers was usually a bust because they would head to the store, find the item on display, give the cashier a ticket and most of the time discover that said item was currently out of stock.  According to the Wikipedia page on the store, this led to the company creating what was then an innovative inventory checking system, where they were able to look up the item you wanted on the inventory of every store in the area, which is something that we take for granted in today’s retail world.

But the prevailing perception was that most of the merchandise at Consumers was non-existent and as much as the company tried to change that, I don’t think it really helped.  It also didn’t help that the Consumers store in the Sayville area was in the Sun Vet Mall, a mall that was closer than any of the malls in the area but was clearly third-tier, especially when compared to the South Shore Mall and Smith Haven Mall, which had big-name department stores.  Sure, Sun Vet had The Gap, which was convenient when I was in junior high and high school, but its anchors were a Rickel Home Center and a PathMark, so it didn’t exactly scream “Galleria” if you know what I mean.

The Consumers store was located in the corner of the mall near the Gap and McCrory, both of which have since left, and whereas the other malls always were bustling, Sun Vet always seemed half dead and while the mall’s pizzeria was excellent and Sun Vet Coin and Stamp always was good for a few back issues, you only went there if you absolutely had to or if you were like me and my friend Jeremy, who would ride there on our bikes when we were teenagers simply because we had very little else to do.  Whereas Service Merchandise would be a huge store that was part of a brand new shopping center down the road, Consumers was shoved into that corner and while the first few catalogs would get people there, the store was pretty dead within a year or two, especially as we’d taken to dragging our parents back to Toys R Us or anywhere else where we knew that would have what we wanted in stock.

So in a way, it was a learning experience about being more strategic in begging for toys and other stuff as well as being more patient, and perhaps that is why so many of us are more intelligent these days about where we shop.