DIDN’T THERE USED TO BE
A HOBBY SHOP HERE?

You used to see these shops and businesses in every town in the country. Nowadays…not so much. Here are some establishments that have virtually disappeared from the retail landscape.

CAMERA STORES. These shops were once the go-to places for serious photographers to purchase camera bodies, lenses, filters, light meters, film, developing chemicals, and so on. The digital revolution cut into this business on two fronts: 1) point-and-shoot cameras—and later smartphones—gave novice shooters a much simpler option than bulky equipment. 2) Amazon and other online camera sellers started selling high-end camera gear at a lower cost than the stores could. It got to the point where photographers were going to camera stores to look at equipment…that they would later purchase online. By the 2010s, most of these camera stores were out of business.

PHOTO-DEVELOPING HUTS. If you took photos with a film camera, you had to go somewhere to get your film developed. Camera stores offered that service, and so did tiny drive-through film-developing kiosks, which offered one-day (or even one-hour) service—a big deal in the days before instant digital photography. It seems like every strip mall housed a Fotomat, or one of its competitors…but not since the mid-1990s.

VIDEO STORES. Shortly after VCRs appeared on the scene in the late 1970s, thousands of small “mom-and-pop” stores started cropping up to offer recent (and classic) movies to watch on cassette. It cost a couple of bucks to rent a movie for a day or two. Eventually, massive chains like Blockbuster Video moved in and soon dominated the market with a huge selection and inventory that drove most small, local shops out of business. At its peak, there were more than 9,000 Blockbusters in the United States. Today, thanks to online streaming video services like Netflix and Hulu, there’s just one Blockbuster still standing (in Bend, Oregon). The other big chains, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery, are long gone, too.

ARCADES. Since video games burst on the scene in the 1970s, kids and teenagers (and adults) have loved spending their time and money helping a pixelated character move on to the next level. Early technology wasn’t very advanced; a massive cabinet was required to hold all the machinery necessary for Pac-Man to eat “pac-dots” and chase (or be chased by) ghosts. But as the technology improved, it also shrunk. After Atari popularized home console video gaming, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft came out with their own systems that allowed gamers to play better games without having to go to the noisy arcade down the street and endlessly pump quarters into the machines.

The Confederate States of America permitted slavery, but banned international slave trading.

RECORD STORES. People just don’t listen to music on “physical media” that much anymore. (Except Uncle John, who still plays 45s and 78s.) Over the past decade, compact disc sales have dropped by more than 80 percent. Now, instead of going to a store to get the hottest new LPs, eight-tracks, cassettes, or CDs, you just download songs to your iPhone or stream them via listening services like Apple Music and Spotify. Music stores couldn’t take the hit, and they’re a relic now. Even though vinyl LPs are making a comeback, big chains like Media Play, Hastings Entertainment, National Record Mart, Musicland, Sam Goody, and Tower Records, along with hundreds of mom-and-pops across the country, are now history.

VARIETY STORES. Before big-box stores like Target and Walmart moved into every region, Americans bought everything from greeting cards to vitamins to clothing to school supplies to lawn furniture at neighborhood variety stores. (Some even had lunch counters, offering sandwiches and hot dogs, back before the proliferation of fast-food restaurants.) Most towns had a local variety or general store, but from the 1880s to the 1960s, variety store chains like Woolworths and Newberry’s dominated retail. The rise of big-box stores—essentially extra-large variety stores—killed this quaint slice of Americana. Woolworths and Newberry’s started petering out in the 1970s, and by 2000 they were gone.

SPORTS CARD STORES. Baseball cards—little pieces of cardboard bearing a photo and statistics of athletes—started to become a mass-produced collectible for sports-crazed kids in the 1950s. Topps, Donruss, and Fleer were the big players, selling packs of 5 to 20 cards for anywhere from a nickel to 50 cents. Back then, the cards were sold in candy stores or variety stores. The whole thing blew up in the 1980s. “Premium” publishers like Upper Deck hit the market, as did artificial scarcity. Result: some cards were estimated to be worth hundreds of dollars. That transformed collecting baseball cards from a kids’ hobby into financial speculation, as adults fought over supposedly rare cards they thought would someday fund their retirement. To meet growing demand, the card companies ramped up production…which made all cards less scarce. The bubble burst by 1993, rendering most cards virtually worthless. Then a baseball players’ strike in 1994 left a bad taste in fans’ mouths, and many kids eventually moved on to fads like POGs and Pokémon cards. In 1990 there were more than 10,000 baseball card shops in the United States. By 2015 only about 500 were left.

Beethoven never learned any math beyond basic addition.