
The Apocalyptic Architecture of One 1970s Retail Chain - yaseen-rob
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/best-superstores-architecture
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TipVFL
Wow, I really like some of those. I'm surprised that I've never even heard of
that company.

There are more pictures available at the source:
[http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/content/best-
products](http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/content/best-products)

~~~
homero
These existed?

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TipVFL
There's one there that's a parking lot that ripples and the store is under the
ripples, and it's only shown as a model. I'm guessing that one was never
built, because it looks really dangerous and confusing for drivers.

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Yhippa
I grew up in Richmond and thought the Best location there was an anomaly. It
was so cool though. The picture doesn't do it justice. When you walk between
the gap from the front of the building to the entrance it felt like you were
in a terrarium. Because of the gap there was such a distinctive earthy, peaty
smell to the whole thing. I did not understand how rare a design was at the
time.

Interesting fact: Sydney (who ran the company) and his wife Francis Lewis (an
art collector) from what I understand had an unfathomably large amount of
modern art located somewhere under Richmond, Va. They have a wing of the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts named after them and donated quite a bit of art
to the museum.

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i_am_nomad
I also grew up in Richmond, and in fact my dad worked at Best. The corporate
headquarters up in Ashland had a really impressive collection of modern art.

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dver
Paid my way through college working for Best.

It was minimum wage. $3.05/hr at the time, unloading 60 ft trailers in 100
degree heat in the late summer. That notwithstanding we actually had
medical/dental and paid vacation time.

Often thought if they'd made it longer, it was a pretty close approximation to
online shopping. Look at an example on the floor and then order from the
warehouse upstairs.

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gniv
> Look at an example on the floor and then order from the warehouse upstairs.

So.. like Ikea?

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function_seven
Sorta. At Ikea (at least near me), you have to go find the items on the
warehouse shelf yourself, and bring them to the registers still.

At Best (and Service Merchandise) you collected tickets for the items you
wanted and brought those up to the front. They'd enter your order, you'd pay
and wait. The items would be picked and sent on a conveyor to the front.

~~~
rwmj
So like Argos?

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LiquidFlux
Do Argos' have showrooms or open floors? My experience, 10 years back, was
limited to a looking through a catalogue, punching in a barcode into their
stock checking device, and waiting for our number to appear on the screen in
the waiting area after having paid.

~~~
rwmj
Very small and incomplete ones. It does sound like the Best store was slightly
different in its model, more like an Ikea/Argos cross.

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softbuilder
I was telling someone about Best the other day. They show my hometown store in
Sacramento. It looked like the corner had exploded out. I always thought that
was just a one-off and it was only that particular store with the weird
architecture. I had never been to another Best.

They had a weird business model too as I (barely) recall. You didn't usually
go there and buy a product and take it home. It was a showroom for products
that were in a catalog. You would order what you wanted from the catalog and
then come back a few days later and they would have it for you. I bought a
calculator watch there in grade school, which was very exciting. However the
experience was so odd, even for that time, that I never bought anything else
from them.

~~~
pwg
The Best showrooms that were in Northern VA operated in that the store was
arranged similar to a WalMart or Target today (rows of shelves), but instead
of taking your item from that shelf, you wrote down its catalog number on a
slip (an 'order form' as it were). You'd then go up front to stand in line and
pay for the items on your slip at a cashier, whereupon the catalog numbers
were entered into their system. This resulted in your products arriving up
from a basement (or down from a 2nd floor depending on which store) warehouse
on a conveyor belt to a 'pickup area' (reminiscent of an airport luggage
carousel, only with employees working the conveyor belt). Those employees
would then hand your items to you and you would leave with them.

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pacaro
Argos in the UK had (has? I have no idea) a similar model

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Theodores
Argos also had its start in the 1970's and has been going strong, adapting to
the marketplace with no major upsets since then.

Curiously Argos was owned by Big Tobacco for many years. I wonder how helpful
that was during a time when retail was far from easy due to inflation, high
interest rates, no EPOS and big changes to VAT, import tariffs and other
taxation.

Much like how illegal drug businesses have front companies that don't have to
make money but allow illegal money to be laundered into the legitimate
economy, I wonder if Argos worked like that, enabling their owners to
repatriate untaxed earnings. If some type of financial engineering went on
then that could explain why Argos survived whereas Best didn't.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Argos was originally a rebrand of the Green Shield Stamps catalogue, I think
after Tesco stopped giving out stamps. Co Op stopped giving Co Op stamps about
the same time. The Embassy Cigarette catalogue was possibly the last points
catalogue survivor!

All the old Green Shield shops became the first Argos shops, and worked very
much the same as they always had, just without the stamps. For the first few
years you could trade old stamps.

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classichasclass
I remember Best, but mostly from the dying days. There was one in my So Cal
hometown with the later staggered red letter logo but it was just a regular
strip mall anchor store, not these gloriously inspired monstrosities.
Sometimes corporations _can_ have a sense of the delightful.

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protomyth
I remember them from their acquisition of Labelle's. They really cheaped out
on that store and went out of business not long after. Labelle's was all
class, and Best was not.

I remember Labelle's for the amazing article in the Grand Forks Herald
describing their parking lot as some nightmare creation of a clearly insane
civil engineer and a drunk mathematician. To bad the article is before the
flood, and they didn't seem to understand the concept of backups.

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xattt
How will Apple Stores age when they’ve outlived their usefulness? Will they
fade into the walls and disappear from the landscape, or will other businesses
move into them but continue to live on in the same spirit as old Pizza Huts?

~~~
lewisflude
When Apple stores close, there are specialists called in to use mallets to
destroy the floors and displays. (Saw this on Reddit, can't find a source at
the moment sadly.)

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ggm
My mother was an art and architecture historian in the Edinburgh college of
art in the 60s, 70s and 80s and I recall her showing me these, in a very fine
book of the architect.

I think a degree of playfulness in buildings is good. Sometimes you want clean
lines and minimalism but sometimes you get a better connection to people by
doing these things.

I have no sense if they actually were functionally easy to maintain and
workable but they certainly stood out in my mind. I recognized the frontage
immediately, from a book I haven't seen in over thirty years.

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duxup
I hadn't thought of suburban strip mall like stores as an opportunity like
that but there they are big buildings being built and rebuilt all the time.
Too bad we don't have anyone willing to try such things now.

I need to get on my city planning board (or whomever approves these things)
and set a "no normal buildings" rule.

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tomjakubowski
Fry's brick and mortar stores might be the closest thing. There's one that has
a flying saucer crashed into it.

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brazzledazzle
I’ve seen an Alice in Wonderland themed one and an Atlantis store (complete
with giant aquariums). They have another one but I think the theme is a musty
dimly lit electronics store with questionable returned merchandise restocking
policies.

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thaumasiotes
> with questionable returned merchandise restocking policies

Heh, I got an mp3 player new from Fry's once.

It came with a large number of songs.

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dexterdog
There was a Best that opened near me when I was growing up. It was in
Lawrenceville, NJ. It wasn't as cool as some of these. It was just kind of a
square building, but the second floor was rotated about three degrees. It took
an otherwise very bland building and made it totally memorable and I still
consider it to be the Best building when I see it.

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S_A_P
I grew up in Houston and still remember my dad pulling a dad joke on me. We
drove by best and he said that building is falling apart why are they letting
people shop there?!? I was 4-5 yrs old at the time and I got genuinely worried
before he burst out laughing. Today that site still exists but it’s been
“fixed” here’s a link from one of my favorite series on the chron.com page.

[https://blog.chron.com/bayoucityhistory/2008/11/then-
now-14/](https://blog.chron.com/bayoucityhistory/2008/11/then-now-14/)

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rypskar
451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons Guess yet another site that decided to not
care about visitors privacy so block all in EU instead of behaving

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draw_down
Maybe, or maybe a newspaper in Texas isn’t too concerned about the EU’s
definition of privacy.

I think part of supporting GDPR is being honest about the fact that it’s not
purely positive for end users.

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mortenjorck
Fascinating. I'd say these kind of run the gamut from inspired (the "Tilt
Building" cuts a memorable profile with just a single plane) to kitsch
("Inside/Out" would have been lovely as an actual structural expressionist
piece, but the brick effect is a big, unnecessary "get it?"). Retail
architecture doesn't have to be post-modern to be interesting, but it's a
shame so much of it today is so aggressively inoffensive.

~~~
draw_down
Everything is! Not just retail. I live in an apartment building that could be
described that way, office spaces... the list goes on.

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AlphaWeaver
This reminds me of the famous children's entertainment venue / science museum
Wonderworks [0] whose building is constructed to appear upside down entirely.

[0]:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=wonderworks&prmd=ivns&tbm=is...](https://www.google.com/search?q=wonderworks&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&sa=X)

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mc32
That's some pretty whimsical architecture. It's be nice if a future retailer
looking for some initial buzz picked up the habit. Their "distressed" facade,
looked even more distressed after it was undressed[1].

On a side note, it reminds me of (at least) houses in Greece not getting
technically completed on purpose to avoid taxation of some form[2].

Also, they are whimsical, even avant guarde designs, but I wouldn't call it
apocalyptic.

[1][https://web.archive.org/web/20060827012947/http://www.texasc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060827012947/http://www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog54/indeterminatefacadeintro.htm)

[2][https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27662/do-
greeks...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27662/do-greeks-evade-
taxes-by-not-finishing-their-houses)

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masonic
Ah, the Catalog Showroom era.

In the Bay Area, Consumer's Distributing came first. Best Products came later.
Service Merchandise came West after that.

There was another small chain called something like DAG or DAK (not the Drew
Allan Kaplan operation). There was a showroom of theirs near Camden and Union
in San Jose near Campbell.

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teej
I immediately recognized the second picture from growing up in Baltimore, MD.
It turns out that James Wines is a graduate of Towson High (class of '51) just
2 miles from where the Towson Best store was.

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fourmii
Those buildings are so cool! Sad that there isn't any will to preserve them.
And those pictures are awesome too, I'm going to be wasting a lot of time now
Googling Best and SITE buildings now...

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Sniffnoy
Some of these are neat, but it seems to me the problem with making your
building look abandoned is that passers-by might just conclude it _is_
abandoned and not come closer to take a look.

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ConceptJunkie
We used to go to the "Peeling Building" in Richmond when I was a kid. That
almost looks like my Dad's Olds 442 in the photo. I've looked for the building
on Google Maps and Street View, but don't recall exactly where it was on the
Midlothian Turnpike.

Best was the Best Buy of its day. I remember being fascinated by the pneumatic
tube system in the store, something you only see now in bank drive-throughs.

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bobo_legos
I remember going to Best as a kid all throughout the 80s. This was the store
in Langhorne Pa.

[https://architectureandbranding.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/...](https://architectureandbranding.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/best-
langhorne-pa.jpg?w=460&h=172)

~~~
chriselles
Thanks for that. I visited the same store as a child as well.

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amyjess
I loved Best when I was a kid, and I was so sad when they disappeared.

I never knew they liked to do cool stuff with architecture. There were one or
two locations in the Dallas area, and now I really wish I remembered what the
buildings looked like.

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newman8r
Reminds me of the concept of a stone mason's folly. I built one in the desert
with dry stone masonry and two bbq pits. Fun project.

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draw_down
Really cool buildings. I had never heard of this at all, and I even lived near
one of the buildings apparently. Thanks for posting!

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xiconfjs
thank you for the link.

