Our local Sears store is kind of like that elderly person that you know and love but just keep saying you’re gonna go and visit before it’s ‘too late’. Somehow, we just never get around to seeing them.
closing
As we roamed around the closing aisles of our Sears store where everything is marked down, one can’t help but have memories of taking the kids there to have their pictures made and buying expensive red and black Craftsman tools. We used to just roam around the mall, ‘shop’ and visit. We didn’t always buy anything, but the local mall was filled on weekends with people just out ‘shopping’ and seeing each other in Camelot Music flipping through albums in bins or trying to get in and out of Spencers without being seen by the old couple that sat behind you in church.
Last night as we roamed the mall with our good friends, I noticed that Chick-Fil-A was busy and the Macys end of the mall had decent shopping traffic. But there are a lot of closed stores in our mall now.
And seeing as how today’s younger generation doesn’t want the responsibility of stuff like we did and still do, it’s hard to imagine how malls and stores will stay open once our generation is wearing Depends and coloring with big crayons.
Hopefully, the generation to follow these bored millennial minimalists will find the internal satisfaction in owning a big yellow Tweetie Bird cookie jar, a box set of The Matrix and a duck with a top hat on that keeps tipping down into a glass of water.
But today it’s apparent that we’ve made a full circle back from placing Sears orders on the telephone to having our shirts and bicycles delivered from Amazon.
The Sears & Robuck catalog was a splendid experience. A big thick catalog filled with colorful dreams and hopes was always exciting to flip through. It was something physical to hold in your hand. It had substance and weight. It was big enough to show people the beauties of a ten speed without them needing to squint or pinch their fingers together on the screen to read it. The Sears catalog was perfect for pressing leaves for the upcoming school leaf collection you had due soon. And it’s bulk and flatness made for a great doorstop in a pinch.
Now, ironically, our local Sears is closing due to sales probably lost to the return of placing ordering things like we used to do from them.
However, this time that air fryer is ordered from people placing their orders with a few taps on the phones that we carry in our pockets. And in 2 days or less, it’s sitting on our front porch in a cardboard box with a smiley face.
There’s no need to dial a rotary phone to the Sears ordering line and have the receiver propped to your shoulder while you stay on hold and cook spaghetti for dinner. 
Speaking of Italian food, although we personally didn’t go to Baudo’s restaurant hardly ever, it wasn’t because it was bad. It just never really came up in choices when we were mulling over places to have dinner. Great food. Nice place. Not inconvenient to get to. Just kinda fell off the places to go eat and for no good reason either.
Jackson, Tennessee will miss these two establishments, for sure. 
Much like when Woolworths closed downtown and moved to the Old Hickory mall, my friends, the times….
they are a-changing.
It’s called ‘progress’ and we are obliged to roll with this said progress lest we still be counting the rings to decide if it’s a phone call to our house or the Bowman’s house up the street.
That’s the best that I can tell about it,
~Mark