Is this a "weird" obsession, even for an aspie?

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Sorry if this sounds like a post for the employment section, but employment isn't really the point of this post.

I don't really know the name of this hobby, but I've had it from a very young age. Company histories, especially company histories that deal with stores and shopping centers, are my obsession. It really makes me happy to learn what stores USED to be in a shopping center but closed, moved, were sold and renamed, got remodeled, etc. I could talk for hours about the history of any of many chain businesses, whether they be drugstore chains, grocery chains, discounters (Wal-Mart/Kmart-type companies), department store chains, restaurant chains, gas station chains, etc. One problem this obsession creates for me is most other people's boredom with it.

My town has a historical society, but most of the members are old people and seem to only be interested in history of SMALL businesses and history prior to 1950, when chain establishments started popping up all over the USA. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is an organization which I despise because they only care about saving buildings older than 50 years old. They ran a commercial about 10 years ago which implied that an older Shell station (like the ones from my childhood which I miss) was a boring eyesore compared to what was there before it. My view is very different from theirs. I think a lot of supermarkets from the 50's, 60's and 70's were pretty interesting. At least the ones here in the Philadelphia area were. It's like archaeology to find remains of them today. Acme, A&P, Food Fair, and Penn Fruit were all chains in my area which had pretty interesting architecture. Acme is the only one of these names which still exists, but their stores have been completely reinvented except for their old name. A&P also still exists, but Super Fresh is the name they use in this area now, and their NYC area stores still have A&P in the name but with prefixes such as "Super Foodmart" etc. Most older grocery stores in this area are now either "independent" supermarkets or have been made into drugstores like CVS.
And that brings up another topic: drugstore chains like CVS and Rite Aid have come a long way since the 60's and 70's. Most of their older stores in shopping centers moved to drive-thru stores, and the old ones were made into dollar stores. I'm lucky to live in Pennsylvania because we have an interesting system of liquor stores run by the state. Each store location is similar to but different from the others. Also, in the smaller towns of the Northeastern USA, we used to have a lot of discounters which all ended up closing their stores out of bankruptcy. Bradlees, Caldor, Jamesway, Ames, Woolco, Grant City, JM Fields, Two Guys, Jefferson Ward, Hills, Zayre, Nichols, King's, Murphy's Mart, and Mammoth Mart are some examples. I was also lucky to live in Texas years ago because a lot of 60's, 70's and early 80's Safeway and Kroger stores were still in use when I was younger. Most have closed during my lifetime. I also witnessed the dramatic failure of Albertsons in Houston and New Orleans, along with the failure of A&P in the latter city.

Don't even get me started on the evolution of department stores. Most Sears, JCPenney, Macy's type stores were found in downtowns, but moved to malls when malls were built in the 60's 70's and 80's. Store chains like Target emerged from the failure of some of these chains in the 80's and 90's.

Also, the gas stations all over the USA have a really complicated and interesting history. Shell had stations in the Philadelphia market 40 years ago, but sold most of them to Texaco, but many of these stations are now Shell once again because of some tricky mergers where multiple oil companies were sued by the Federal Trade Commission for monopolizing the industry.

I just finished high school a few months ago (at the beginning of June) but am going through a more bitter than sweet phase of life right now. A job counseling agency has been working with me, but I am really disappointed in them. Maybe it's my fault that I misunderstood my parents' advice, but I had gotten the impression that the agency would help me explore careers that INTEREST me in depth. So far, I have done all this for the agency (after only about 10 days working with them over a period of months):

1. explain my hobbies in detail to one of their counselors (this was on the first day, so we WERE off to a good start)

2. give a "tour" of my neighborhood to another one of the counselors on the second day (this was great too)

3. bag groceries (they put me on the spot the day I did this by surprising me with the assignment, and it was kind of embarrassing)

4. make a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (I think they wanted me to do this because they ASSUMED I had an interest in learning computer programs, even though I DON'T)

5. go all the way downtown to an art gallery to help set up an exhibit, but all I got to do was put tape on the floors and walls (I was graded on this!) and paint the walls

6. go into a really bad area of town to a college library, where I looked through their photography archives, and I was expected to answer a survey about each and every picture (based on information that many of them were NOT labeled with) and handwrite with a small pencil, with gloves on my hands

7. take a spelling test, even though spelling has never been a problem for me (I think the agency was confused by the fact that I have a READING disability, not a spelling one)

On the last day I was tested, a week or two ago, I got to interview an Enterprise Rent-A-Car clerk about his business (yes I interviewed him, not the other way around) which was a nice improvement over the other evaluations. But I have some important complaints about the agency sending me there. The guy kept bringing financial issues into our conversation, which seemed to be completely off topic, and I was embarrassed because I had no idea what he was talking about. And working with a rental car agency had absolutely nothing to do with any of the 13 job categories on the list of job categories I said I was interested in. But the agency made a stretch and sent me to Enterprise because I said I was interested in being an emergency vehicle buyer, and rental car companies go through a similar buying process to police departments.

I thought i was the only one!

I am all about retail 1960-2000. Here in New England there is no shortage of failed/failing department stores. Storefronts are known to sit empty for over a decade, in fact, in Old Town Maine there is an old Ames department store that closed in 98, it still sits empty, with all the old graphics on the wall.

I don't see anything odd about your fascination with company histories. It's actually something contributors on Wikipedia do. There have even been shows about the history of certain stores like Wal-Mart, Sears, HEB and Aldi.

I think your obsession with compny histories sounds interesting...I remember going to an Albertson's in Buffalo when I was a kid. I found their cafeteria style restaurant overwhelming! So many choices! And architecturally speaking, there were some pretty interesting 'futuristic' gas stations built in the 60's and 70's.
But as far as your job search goes....I don't think you can really expect a job counselling agency to find you a 'career' that interests you, straight out of high school. These days a BA is comparable to what a high school diploma got you 10 years ago. Have you considered college, or university?

It's not weird. It's interesting history.

I know historians that study weirder things. As for me, well, I had a weird fascination with city planning when I was a kid - tried to draw diagrams of cities that worked perfectly.

That's weird for an 9-11 year old girl.

It doesn't sound all that odd to me. I think what you are interested in might fall under the heading of anthropology as it seems to deal with the changing way in which our culture deals with every day life situations. I too have a sort of nascent interest in this sort of thing and love finding old buildings and shops and trying to figure out what they once were. Unfortunately though, it seems the pace of "progress" has accelerated in the modern world so much that is is almost impossible to keep track. Everything today is meant to be thrown away after a short service life and nothing has any real permanence except for the garbage we create. We forget where we came from in the never-ending race just to keep pace with the rest of society.

It's probably an aspie/autie thing to be fascinated with these histories. About 7 years ago I drove from Nashville, Tennessee to Seattle, Washington. It took me a few days. During the trip, around 2 in the morning, I started running out of gas on I-90. I went into a small town on the Crow Reservation in Montana called Lodge. They almost seemed stuck back in time because their one gas station, which was closed until 8am, had pumps that were, like, 50 years old! Too cute. Pure analog. It was great. Looked like something out of the Twilight Zone. It was a meth town, though. That means graffiti everywhere, impenetrable chicken wire over the convenience store windows, etc. Tragic. I slept over night in the IGA parking lot and waited till 8am for the store to open. The owner told me I was lucky because the locals like to rob tourists.

I really enjoy local history I have a problem of finding where to learn about it.

Well, it would not be for me, but it does not sound all that weird. Heck look at some of my past ones: Jumping Spiders. Ant colony wars. Various Fantasy book series ( well, a couple).
Serial killers.
I like history if it relates to exploration, or also, military history.

Sincerely,
Matthew

maybe you can work for Dunn and Bradstreet- a longstanding encyclopedea of existing businesses.

Or maybe you can start a website of thats a local time-depth version of Dunn and Bradstreet for your area and charge for advertising.

It is amazing -if you're over a certain age- how things change.

I worked for two rival- no THREE rival office supply store companies in the suburbs of the nations capital. One was a small chain, one was a large chain, one was a single store owned by one lady. But that one store had more square footage and inventory than any single store in either of the two bigger local chains ( one big store pitted against two chains of smaller stores) This was back in the eighties. All three companies were well known locally.

Now all three companies are gone. Put out of business by the national chains- Office Depot, and Staples. And then one of those went out of business in the current recession! Only Staples is still around.

A friend of mine was a sales rep at an E.J. Korvettes (a big box chain like Target) in a major that still thrives. He even ripped off an inflatable swimmng pool from them.

By the nineties when I was playing a trivial persuits type game with some people even the older players had forgotten that the chain had ever existed and refused to accept it as legitimate answer to the question "name a defunct company".

This all sounds perfectly normal to me (for an aspie at least)! ! It is sad how few people couldn't care less about "Things that aren't there anymore"...

My thing is for abandoned railroads, specifically the Western Maryland Railway. Talk about "boring", mine doesn't have anything to do with shopping!

And their main seaport (Port Covington) has been razed and turned into a (you know what)...

Not weird for an aspie/ autistic

I don't log it all down but I thought I was one of the very few that leaned toward this topic - the other day my family found something else about me to annoy them when I pointed out an old Denny's that is now a daycare.

One of my favorite structures is a 2-story Chevron or Texaco gas station that had a restaurant on the top floor if I'm correct; I've never seen one open as its intended purpose, only as a dance club or flower shop

No, it's actually quite interesting... I've had some crazy obsessions though.

Not only is it not odd, there is a career for people like you.

Corporate libraries hire people to do that very thing. They are always looking for company information in order to approach them for new clients. The more information they know going in, the better they can sell the client on their services. I did the exact thing for 11 years -- 6 years for an accounting firm (KPMG) and 5 years for an energy company (Enron...yes, THAT Enron). I loved the work. There isn't as much call for it as there used to be. The Internet has made searching for this type of info much easier than it once was. But there are still many jobs out there for researchers, especially in places like DC and Boston. Offiicially, the position is called Information Research Professional or Competitive Intelligence Professional.

There is even a master's degree program....Master of Library Science. Yes, it involves learning about cataloging and recordkeeping and such, but because libraries have become so much more than just books, there is also emphasis on information research, database management and digital media.

Here are some facts which really helped to stoke my interest:

1. 15 years ago, Wawa (a Philadelphia convenience store chain) started selling their own gas. A few years later, they started a campaign to replace all their older locations (mostly from the 60's) with gas ones. I still think of a lot of their late 90's stores as "new", but many are now showing their age! The newer one in Lancaster didn't last long and is now an independent gas station/c-store. I wonder what happened because I've never heard of Wawa closing a newer store. But a lot of the very small, low-volume old ones have been sold to other companies. For example, the one in Drexel Hill PA (which still has two older Wawas very close together) became a "Welsh Farms" in 2002. I can't believe it's been 10 years now. Ironically, the also very old and small Wawa in Wallingford PA got the chain's new logo in 2004, but became a "Pantry 1" in 2007.

2. Even though Chevron bought the Texaco name and Texaco refineries, Shell bought most Texaco stations (and renamed them) in the past decade. Ironically, most current Texaco stations were converted to that name from brands such as Mobil, which had to sell many stations when Exxon bought it. And coincidentally (or maybe not, maybe the two had the same design firm) a lot of Texaco station signs by the road were easily converted to the Shell look, because their shape was identical to existing Shell signs!

3. The Eckerd drugstore chain bought Thrift Drug, a Philadelphia chain, along with its "small town" division Fay's, in 1997. All the Thrift Drug and Fay's stores were converted to the Eckerd name and remodeled (a VERY expensive move), but Eckerd still decided to build drive-thru stores to replace many of these no later than 2000. I think this was the primary reason for Eckerd's own downfall (half the company sold out to Rite Aid, and the rest CVS). Dozens of the older locations, many of which never found a place to move to, ended up closing in disgrace in the 2000s. It's a shame because Thrift Drug had built a huge batch of stores in 1996, most of which crashed and burned (sales wise), prompting the sale to Eckerd, and even after adopting the famous chain's business model couldn't compete.

4. Acme, the Philadelphia grocery chain, built some really nice stores with a pointy roof and stained glass windows in the 60's, but most of them had to be expanded (also remodeled on the outside, hiding the pointy roof) in the late 70's to keep up with competitors which were also growing rapidly.

5. Genuardi's, the Philadelphia grocery chain which just sold out to arch-rival GIANT, was still using their 1950s logo (the chain was still very small during that time) in the chain's "glory days" of the late 80's and early 90's. But in 1995, a new logo was introduced, and all traces of the old one quickly disappeared.

6. Albertsons built two stores on Spring-Cypress Road in Spring Texas in 1991. The two were identical inside, but looked very different on the outside. One was much fancier than the other. It had a "copper castle" look and is still open today as a Kroger. But the other one had to close for good in 2002 and has been empty 10 years now. Kroger would have bought this one but it was too close to an existing Kroger which was more modern.

7. The very last new Safeway in Houston was built in 1984, but Safeway sold its Texas stores to a chain called AppleTree in 1988. This chain failed in 1993, and this particular location was later a Randalls, but closed in 1998 when Randalls and its Dallas division Tom Thumb were bought by, ironically, Safeway! Then this location was an H-E-B Pantry Foods, but closed when H-E-B shut down their Pantry Foods division in 2002. Finally, after four different grocery chains used it, this building is now a Stein Mart clothing store. Three Safeway/AppleTree stores in small towns near Houston also became H-E-B Pantry Foods, but without the Randalls detour in between, and have since been demolished for much larger H-E-B stores. After a delay of a few years, H-E-B has built a new store in a brand new plaza across from the Safeway one.

8. Wal-Mart built a store in The Woodlands (a small town near Houston TX) in 1984, but moved across the street to a new store in 1990. The old one became a "Bud's Discount City" (a Wal-Mart clearance outlet) but this Bud's closed in 1994, before the rest of the chain. Ironically the store was later a Ben Franklin Crafts, which closed in 1997, the same year as the remaining Bud's stores folded. There was also a Kmart practically next door to this original Wal-Mart, and only a narrow street separated the two. The Kmart was remodeled in 1990 in response to Wal-Mart upgrading, but closed in 1994 at the same time as the nearby Bud's. Hobby Lobby (a chain which could be blamed for the demise of Ben Franklin Crafts) is in the former Kmart today. The 1990 Wal-Mart here was unique because it had the plain hyphen logo on the front, and never got the more famous logo with a star in the middle (not the newest "Walmart" with a star logo). Other than this, it matched almost all other 90's Wal-Mart stores. But in 2007 the store moved again, to a Supercenter, and was ironically one of the company's last new stores to have the 1992 star logo and "Supercenter" in the name.

9. Dixie Square Mall, one of the first enclosed malls in the USA, opened in Harvey, Illinois (near Chicago) in 1966. One of the first JCPenney stores in a mall (when the chain was still called "Penneys") was its main anchor. All the stores in the mall closed in stages between 1974 and 1979 due to a huge spike in area crime. Many towns in America never even had a mall until the mid-late 70's if not 80's or early 90's. The whole mall was abandoned for over 30 years until its recent demolition.

10. Wal-Mart and many grocery chains (along with Michaels Arts & Crafts) stopped using foam ceilings in their new stores starting around 1995. They started using "warehouse" ceilings similar to the ceilings at stores such as Home Depot and Lowe's. I find it amazing how the Genuardi's in Lansdale PA, which had the older design, sits empty (probably with those old "tube" lights still running) but the identical (inside) Genuardi's in Glen Mills PA was torn down for a Whole Foods, which has a warehouse ceiling. Most Genuardi's built after Safeway bought the chain had warehouse ceilings though.