does anyone else remember bradlee’s?
does bradlee’s still exist?
ok, to reminisce, bradlee’s was kind of a down-market caldor’s.
wait, does caldor’s still exist?
well, suffice it to say that caldor’s(especially when i was 8 years old)wasn’t particularly fancy.
and bradlee’s was, to be honest, the poor relation to caldor’s.
if caldor’s lived on the bad side of the tracks then bradlee’s lived in the pj’s.
and not the pj’s with grass, but the pj’s with dirt yards and broken swingsets.
and bradlee’s was where i spent a significant(in terms of time and emotional development…)portion of my childhood.
bradlee’s was where you went shopping with your mom if you and your mom were on welfare and needed to buy, say, back to school clothes.
or shoes. or discount generic shampoo.
and the goal at bradlee’s was 3-fold.
fold 1-make sure that no one you knew saw you going in or out of bradlee’s.
one time i was back to school shopping with my mom at bradlee’s and i saw some of the normal kids exercising their new-found quasi autonomy and upon seeing them i promptly hid in one of those circular metal clothing racks until i was sure that they had gone elsewhere).
fold 2-find the things in bradlee’s that didn’t look like they had come from bradlee’s.
like a $5 pair of sneakers with 4 stripes that from a distance looked like adidas.
or a jacket that somehow didn’t smell like government cheese.
and so on.
fold 3-find people at bradlee’s who were poorer/worse off than you.
see, if you want REAL class consciousness just spend some time with people below the poverty line(and yes, i spent the first 26 years of my life far, far, far below the poverty line,
so i know of what i speak).
you’d think that there’d be some solidarity below the poverty line, but oh-no, it’s vicious. there’s a surfeit of ‘well, we’re poor, but they’re POOR’. unfortunately i was usually in the POOR camp of poor. like when we lived in stratford connecticut. see, i knew blue-collar families where the husband was out of work and the mother was working part-time at a convenience store and they still felt sorry for my mom and me.
that’s poor. and in some ways being really really poor is altruistic, cos invariably you make everyone feel pretty good about their own circumstances.
one hallmark of being poor is learning to never ask for anything. or to ask cautiously and surreptitiously and diplomatically and indirectly. like suppose you’re walking by the hot-dog counter at bradlee’s, you’d never ask: ‘hey, can i get a hot dog??’ instead you’d just kind of walk a little bit slower and maybe give long and loving looks at the hot dog counter in the hopes that maybe the fickle gods of government money would indirectly bless you with a hot dog through the limited fiduciary benevolence of your mom.
although it usually ended up that a bradlee’s hot dog was off limits. which really is/was probably for the best.
bradlee’s hot dogs were probably made out of the things that the caldor’s hot dog makers threw away.
and the caldor’s hot dogs were probably made out of the things that the supermarket hot dog makers threw away.
and we all know that supermarket hot dogs are made out of rats.
or leprous dogs.
so we’ve established that the bradlee’s hot dogs were pretty low on the edible-food-chain, probably somewhere between cardboard and bleach.
i wonder if there’s a chain store that occupies the unique place that had been previously occupied by bradlee’s?
i’m going to go to trusty wikipedia and have a look.
ok, now i know.
bradlee’s went out of business in 2000.
but apparently before going out of business they launched a web-station to encourage interweb traffic on the electronic super high way.
here’s a gem:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980423210142/www.bradlees.com/html/why.html
another site(with a picture of the bradlee’s at ‘the dock’ in stratford, connecticut((my home when i was 9 & 10)) i think i’m going to have nightmares tonight…’no, please mom, not bradlee’s, no bradlee’s, please, i’ll be good.’):
http://thecaldorrainbow.blogspot.com/2007/02/retail-profile-bradlees.html
-moby