(THESE ARE NOT MY PICTURES AND I GIVE THANKS TO DEAD AND DYING RETAIL.)
There was a time when a chain from New England sold electronics and appliances at fare prices and put smiles on patriot faces, they were called Lechmere, and there was a store in Charlotte, North Carolina that changed some peoples lives, and like High school, leaves memories to cherish and to never be forgotten by the people who experienced some of the best times of there lives.
Before Montgomery Ward closed to remaining 27 stores in November 1997, there was about 20 in the New England area, 2 of which were in Massachusetts, and somehow one made it to the Charlotte area. Here are many memories the employees spent with each other over the years before the store closed, and later became Best Buy.
It is nice to see stores like this, or at least pictures, because now everyone is taking pictures of stores like this because social media is so strong, its only natural to document this happening, as any other public event, or social concern. Either you find pictures of stores from now, or forty years ago, but there has to be more pictures from the late 90's to the early 00's that depict what stores were like and the merchandise they sold.
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| This has now been reduced to one shelf of mixed media in the back of some supercenters. |
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| Great times at Lechmere |
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| Remember when appliances were yellow, cream, and white colored. |
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| All online now |
Thank you for reading and remember if you have any comments or questions, feel free to post below.
All of the above pictures, with the exception of the exterior of the store, are mine. I emailed them to my friend Mike at Dead and Dying Retail. I used to work at the Charlotte store. It would have been nice, if you were going to lift and repost my pictures, for you to blur my name. Be a little bit decent!
ReplyDeleteIs Mike your personal friend, I am friends with him as well. Besides, I understand that this is a privacy issue, and I am sorry. I should have blurred the information depicted in the pictures above.
DeleteJudging by the "Working Girl" VHS tapes, which were released on October 5, 1989, these pictures would have most likely been taken in late 1989.
ReplyDeletePerhaps they were taken at the beginning of, or right before, the Going Out of Business sale that Lechmere had for all of their Southern stores in 1989. I believe that sale was announced right around October 5, 1989 as well. Lechmere was always a Northeastern store, their home base was in Massachusetts, but about 1986 (I think) they opened a few stores in the south, I think, by 1989 they had 10 stores in the south when they were bought out. They'd been a division of Dayton Hudson (best known for Target) and then Dayton Hudson sold them to an equity firm in 1989, as a condition of the sale they had to close all their locations in the south. They re-focused their efforts on the Northeast and were successful for a few more years and then Montgomery Ward bought them in 1994 and closed them in 1997 when MW filed for bankruptcy.
If Montgomery Ward had never bought them, they probably would have lasted long past 1997. I'm not sure if they'd be open today, because there have been two retail crises since then (the Great Recession and the current retail shakeout). I would guess that, most likely, if MW had never bought them they would have lasted to the recession in 2008-2009.