Trending
By the time one reaches his late 70s there are things from his past that are missed. I miss dime stores.
Dime stores were also known as five-and-dime stores. They sold low-price merchandise at fixed prices of five or ten cents and were introduced to American shoppers in the late 1800s.
One of the dime stores' attractions was openly displayed merchandise so shoppers didn't have to ask a clerk to view the items.
Early American dime stores were started by Franklin Winfield Woolworth and Sebastian Spering Kresge. Many cities had both an F.W. Woolworth's and an S.S. Kresge's store.
My best memory of a dime store goes back to the mid-to-late 1950s and Clayton's Variety Store in Jewell, Iowa. By this time, dime stores were selling merchandise at a variety of prices.
My sweet tooth desires were supplied by Clayton's candy counter. Clayton's also sold red paper rolls of caps for my cap gun. I shopped for birthday cards for my mother at Clayton's where they sold basic greeting cards for a dime; fancier cards for a quarter. It usually took me a while to select the perfect birthday card from the 10-cent collection.
Clayton's selection of school supplies always drew my interest. Going into sixth grade I had a newspaper route and the funds needed to purchase a new three-ring binder. Clayton's had one that caught my attention: a zippered red cover three-ring binder embossed and imprinted with a black and gold dragon design. The binder did nothing to improve my grades that year but I was sure proud to carry it to school.
My mother was close to her Tante Antje (Aunt Annie) who had emigrated to Iowa from Germany as a young adult. When Tante Antje spent a few days in our home one summer, Mom took her shopping for sewing supplies at Clayton's.
Hearing raised voices from the sewing section, Mom hurried to investigate. Tante Antje spoke heavily accented English and was having difficulty explaining to the store clerk what she wanted. The clerk didn't understand that Tante Antje's request for "blake tret" meant "black thread."
By the early 1960s our family shopped more frequently in our county seat of Webster City, a larger community with an impressive downtown that included two big dime stores ̶ Woolworth's and Newbury's, another national chain.
Much of my Saturday night shopping times were spent at Woolworths or Newbury's. Spending money was usually in short supply but I enjoyed looking over the possibilities.
Newbury's left Webster City by the early '70s and Woolworth's left a few years later. When Cindy and I moved to Sioux City in 1974, the downtown was graced by a huge Woolworth's and an equally-large Kresge's. Both stores closed by the early '80s.
The 1980s version of a dime store was the popular Ben Franklin stores which were found in many midwestern communities. By the mid-20th century there were about 2,500 Ben Franklin stores, most of them on Main Streets of smaller communities.
Peters Park was a business district in our Morningside neighborhood of Sioux City and it was anchored by a large Ben Franklin store. My children loved the store and rode their bikes there with friends to spend their allowances. The store had an excellent display of sports cards and my son collected hundreds of them. Both of our children were fond of the store's extensive candy counter.
The Ben Franklin store in Peters Park also offered an excellent craft department and was a popular place for area crafters.
The Ben Franklin chain suffered bankruptcy in the mid-1990s and their stores have virtually disappeared from the retail scene. The closures were met with sadness by many in their communities.
The Woolworth and Kresge stores were replaced by big box stores. Woolworth's moved to the big box model with their Woolco stores. Kresge's morphed into big-box K-Mart. Sioux City had one of each and we shopped at both.
Now there are no dime stores left and my need to shop at one has vanished. The dime stores of years ago, however, are warmly remembered... and missed.
(Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2026 by Huisman Communications.)