>>10750439I miss it, but what I miss more were hobby stores and there variety of stuff, along with the guys young and old going in and out for everything from paint by numbers to paintball guns.
This was a place I used to go to before I moved away from NJ, it sadly closed in 2020. In its final decade the couple in the commercial (the owners) divorced, the son got the business after a legal battle with the wife and the Great Wuhan Flu of 2020 was the final nail in the coffin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbigv3luqYwI went back to NJ a few years ago to see my grandmother and visited the last store wanted to visit, a place called Ridgefield Hobby. You need to come in on the right day, though, because you have to wait for the guy behind the counter mention the basement. The place has hardly changed since this video was made.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_6ChZ3iwaoWhen I moved down to where I am now (Florida). I had five hobby shops to choose from, now there are just two. The three shops I regularly visited were the ones that closed down, a HobbyTown USA, a place called Ernie's Hobby Shop (Ernie retired and he had no one to pass the business on to) and Riverside Hobbies (the owner previously had a shop in NJ, but he moved down too). The owner was looking to sell the business and these two guys from the U.K wanted to buy it and run the business "remotely (they were to live in the U.K, but keep Americans hired), the plans fell through though and about a year later the owner passed away (he was either 86 or 87 at the time). His wife then took over, but she could not keep up, so the store was closed.
One of the stores left is run by a personal enemy of the owner of Riverside Hobbies and he hates just about everyone who has ever shopped at Riverside. He also voids warranties on some of the products he buys by modifying them with a "safety circuit".
The other remaining store is my current go to, but they are mostly trains, which I have little room for.
