Newberry's, Kress's and Woolworth's?

I'd forgotten all about these places until I noticed Woolworths mentions somewhere. What memories. They were all giants. "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi"!

Kress's had a very, very long lunch counter and had the oldest waitresses in the entire civilized world, I'll swear. As a kid I was in awe of them, but looking back they may not have been as old as they seemed.

And of course "Sprouse-Reitz". Way, way back when I was an investigator for a private company, mostly worker's comp and other insurance fraud, some domestic and a little employee honesty. I was sent to a small town in Eastern Washington to see what I could find out about the Sprouse-Reitz store there, it was having problems comparing the inventory with sales. The store was free-standing, and had a sales kiosk with two registers by the front door. A neatly dressed younger man was walking around and around the kiosk, waving his arms and exclaiming, "Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no!" I stopped and looked at him and started to say something when he noticed me. He simply stopped, offered no explanation, and started fussing with the stuff around the checkout counter.

I wanted to get a sense of him, he was the manager, and wandered around the store, but he offered no assistance. I took some of the shaving cream popular at the time, the type which heated up as it came out of the can and headed over to him.

"How does this work?"

He took the can, read the label, shook it, and handed it back while exclaiming solemnly, with an air of authority and finality,

"It's got electrons in it."

(It turned out he was getting married very shortly and wanted to impress his fiance's family with his earning ability. He was robbing the place blind in an extremely unsophisticated manner - simply not recording sales while working from an open register. If one asked for a receipt he explained the register was broken and wrote one out from a pad they sold. When I examined the detail tapes (those which were inside the register as opposed to the receipt tapes) they had long periods of time with no sales, an obvious problem it didn't take a big-city guy to notice. It was just a matter of going back in enough to find when he was working the open register. I was glad I didn't have to see the aftermath of my report, though he did avoid jail.

Arf