Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 16, 1993 TAG: 9311030382
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Thousands of workers will continue to populate downtown offices. The restaurant and specialty-shop action will continue to flourish in the City Market area, just a couple of blocks east of the Campbell Avenue location where Woolworth has been doing business for nearly a century. Seventeen lost jobs will mean little in a local economy where thousands are employed.
But those 17 jobs are important to the people who hold them - just as the store has been important to its customers, particularly the regulars who ate and shopped there. And the passing of the downtown Woolworth serves as another marker for the passing of an era.
The question is: Which era? America can survive the passing of an era that saw a profusion of all-purpose retail stores downtown. Americans have faith in the connection between creative capitalism, even with lamentable side effects, and the nation's progress.
We must take care to ensure, though, that we do not let pass an era in which democracy and simplicity were regarded as central to the character of America. That era, the history and soul of the nation, needs to continue.
Woolworth was the last of the five variety stores - in pre-inflation days, they were called "dime stores" or "five-and-dimes" - that once competed for business in downtown Roanoke. Descendants of the old general store, they carried a little of a lot of things, mostly inexpensive everyday items like buttons and light bulbs, shoelaces and school supplies. Their lunch counters, serving the plain but filling fare of burgers and fried chicken, flourished in an age before Americans took a liking to more exotic ethnic foods or worried about calories and cholesterol.
Though variety stores have not vanished - the Woolworth in Towers Mall, for one, is to remain open - their niche in the retail sector is diminishing. On one side they are squeezed by boutique-style specialty shops; on the other, by giant warehouse-type operations that carry a lot of a lot of things.
A city like Roanoke can do a lot of things to promote commerce downtown, despite the obvious and understandable lure of suburban malls. The city has done many of these things, such as providing parking and facilities for cultural attractions, as well as some things that other cities have failed to do. The city could do more, such as work harder to promote housing downtown. But it can't save Woolworth.
The decline of the variety store is no doubt the result of many positive forces. Just as calorie and cholesterol consciousness is, on the whole, a good thing, so are the increased prosperity, greater mobility and wider array of goods and services available to the consumer that have reshaped American shopping habits.
But this does not mean that nothing valuable has been lost.
There is, in part, the historical record. One of the 400 Woolworth stores sentenced to death is the downtown store in Greensboro, N.C., site of the lunch-counter sit-ins that led eventually to the outlawing of racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.
There is also the current reality. Regular patrons of the Woolworth in downtown Roanoke are a diverse lot, ranging from middle-class professionals who meet there for lunch to folks who, to get around town, rely on the city buses that converge in the transportation center across Campbell Avenue from the store. Yet there has also seemed a spirit of community, of which Woolworth employees were a part, that transcended social and economic differences among the clientele. The sad part is that such an atmosphere should be unusual enough to be remarkable.
Finally, there was the merchandising idea itself. F.W. Woolworth and his competitors made money because simple goods in a simple setting were what and how Americans of an earlier time wanted to shop. Adults of a certain age today can remember the fun as children in going downtown to the "dime store" - where, amid the smells of caramel and popcorn, there seemed a wonderful infinity of simple items to choose from, each priced within a child's comprehension and, sometimes, pocketbook.
The material wealth of contemporary America, and of contemporary middle-class childhood, is in many ways a blessing. It would be silly as well as futile to yearn for the days before niche marketing, or to begrudge the computers and cars, the CDs and VCRs. But neither let us forget the simpler pleasures and the joys to be taken from small things, from the nickel-and-dime stuff.
by CNB