Friday, March 15, 2019

Mmmall Mmmemoirs

Today I was looking through news headlines and I was surprised to see a Toronto Star headline, "The Rise and Fall of the 90's Muffin." That intrigued me, because it combines two favourites of mine (the 90's and muffins, that is; not so keen on rise-and-falls.)

It turns out to be the story of the MMMuffins chain. If your personal journey through time and space hasn't taken you near that name, I'll tell you that they were a chain of muffin shops, predominantly in malls, in Canada, through the 80's and 90's. If you haven't heard of them, I'm sure you can think of a similar example of a chain that used to be ubiquitous but is now gone.

The chain is, surprisingly, not completely out of business: according to their website, they have precisely two locations left, one in Toronto, one in Montreal. Also strange about that: they have a website. It looks kind of weird to see an older name with "www." & ".com" around it. Just watch:
www.k-tel.com
www.fotomat.com
www.pan-am.com
www.americanmotors.com/gremlin
www.ptl.org
www.coleco.com/cabbagepatch

And that leads to my realization: stores can come and go without you even noticing. They're sort of like TV commercials. Sometimes I'll be watching something recorded a few months ago and I'll catch one of the commercials and be like, wow, where did you go? You were everywhere and then, boom, nothing. And I didn't even notice.

It's hard to believe, but entire store chains can disappear from consciousness, like MMMuffins. I'm pretty sure that at least once in the last twenty years, I asked myself, "hey, what ever happened to that MMMuffins place?" But on the other hand, I didn't even notice The It Store was gone until a few years back when I saw it on a Facebook meme of stores that have disappeared. They used to be a regular mall feature, now they're so forgotten they don't even have a Wikipedia entry.

So let's spare a thought for some of the chains that have disappeared unceremoniously from our malls:
Randy River
Northern Elements/Getaway
Big Steel Man
Bata
Thrifty's
Cotton Ginny
Coconut Joe
Lewiscraft
Leasure World
Direct Film
Smart Set


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