Locations You Loved That No Longer Exist

video rental stores in general, also Circuit City and Suncoast Video. Also there's some local restaurants that closed down that I miss.

There was a shopping center about 8-10 miles from where I live that as a child, my parents and grandparents would take me to sometimes in the 90s and early 00s that I miss. It was the only place I had ever been to like it. I remember often wondering why every time we were there, there wasn't many people there, despite being close to a town and I don't remember a time, even near Christmas that there were many people in it. It had a certain kind of atmosphere you only get from such a shopping center where not many people go. One area of the main (hallway?) area was dimly lit and had stairs that went up to I think managers, security or employee offices or something.

I remember going there and there was this "ride" I used to go on as a small child. Not exactly a ride, but you get in a put some money in and it would play a Hanna-Barbera cartoon like The Flintstones on a screen. I also remember one shop that sold electrical parts like fuses, plugs, or light bulbs, which never seemed to be open when we were there, and a shop beside it that kept changing its inventory every so often which I thought a little unusual. The shopping center eventually got bought out and replace with a supermarket and more people go to it now, but I'll always have my memories of that sort of off feeling I got when going there, that I didn't have with other shopping centers that had much more people in them.

There used to be a mom and pop video store in my area that I think went under sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. It was a small little shop and up until a few years ago, you could still see the weathered logo painted on the side of the building when you were driving down the road. When I was helping my family do some cleaning, I found one of the old store catalogs in a closet and I think I still have it somewhere. It would be cool to get it scanned and archived since they seemed to have it all, including the first two Faces of Death movies and I think the first four Hellraiser ones as well.

I miss Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I used to just wonder through my local one and fantasize about if I lived in a mansion with several bathrooms and extra bedrooms what I would buy. I also miss Outback Steakhouse. I know they are still around, but I miss the one that was two miles from my house. So many birthday memories from there.

I used to go to Toys R Us once a month before it went out of business in the US. The pop up ones or the ones in Macy's aren't the same, especially since I used to visit the one in NYC. It's weird that if I traveled to Canada or Japan, I would just want to go to Toys R Us.

There was a mall my mom used to take me and my sister to the day after Thanksgiving as a tradition called Grand Avenue Mall in Milwaukee, it was pretty empty whenever we went and you could tell it was on the decline(as there was a broken elevator on the top-floor that was lit inside but not working otherwise)and the last year we went I paid a visit to Sam Goody and was shocked that they were still selling GameGear games some 5 years after the system was discontinued. Since then the place is basically unrecognizable, it got a remodel a few years later as "The Shops of Grand Avenue" but the economic downturn seriously hampered it's chances and now part of the mall has been turned into office space and whatnot and it feels like it's only a matter of time before it closes for good, hope Bright Sun Films does a video about it.

I've always had a fascination for Dead Malls and i'm curious which wall you visited as a kid.

Back from the 1980's through 2001, there was a local video rental store called TBI Video near where I lived at the time.  When I was a kid, my father would take my siblings and I almost every weekend, and most days of the week throughout the summers, to pick out one movie for each of us, and usually at least one NES game for us to watch, play, and fight over when we weren't being stupid outside.  It was the place where we rented the very first "R" rated movie I remember ever watching way too young (The Toxic Avenger, and I was around 6 or 7), and experiencing some of my favorite NES games I've ever played, like Faxanadu, Monster Party and the first Final Fantasy.

Sometime in the late 1990's, the owner was getting rid of all of the old movie and game stock he had, because he was anticipating selling the property due to the state expanding the state highway that the store had sat upon for its entire life of operation.  He and somewhere around 50 other property owners on about a 10 mile stretch of the highway that ran through and a little ways outside of the city limits of the town had all sold their properties by the middle of 2001, and within about 2 years all of those buildings, including the one that housed TBI Video, were demolished, and the highway was expanded from 2 to 4 lanes, killing a big part of my childhood.