Your videos are so wonderful. Really glad I came upon them as my Mom passed in January 2022, these are all places we used to go...Thank you for refreshing some long lost memories!
Thanks Eric! You really had to see it to believe it back in its heyday. Those basement sales were WILD. Filenes on Washington Street was absolutely one of a kind! Very much missed
Dam you do good work! Outside the MERCHANDISE MART in Chicago, there is a statue of Edward Albert Filene, along with people like Marshall Field, and Montgomery Ward. Being from the Midwest, we had never heard of FILENE, but he was noteworthy enough to have his head immortalized for his contributions to the retail world at that mega building YEARS earlier. Shortly after I saw the statue, they opened a Filenes Basement on MICHIGAN AVENUE (I think that that was sometime in the 1990's in the defunct I MAGNIN store). In Wisconsin, all we had was a GIMBELS basement. (Hey, how about a story about GIMBELS)!
Another store consolidated into Macy's. The thing is most of these regional chains had legacies and we're dear to the community they served like filenes and the minimum wage standard for females. Shame that it had to go down like that. Great video!
