Date: Thu, 8 Feb 1996 07:15:33 CST
From: "Donald M. Lance" ENGDL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU
Subject: Re: Five & Dime / Dime store
Tom, I was alive through 85% of the 1930s, but I remember the "million
dollar baby in the five and ten cent store" from the 1940s. Someone else
will come on and say it was 1950s, I'm sure.
For me those stores were always "dime stores" but I used those other
terms when I knew interlocutors preferred the clumsier labels. That's
the term my parents used; for a time when I was in the first grade my
mother worked in the dime store downtown, Kress's.
The contemporary dollar stores seem to me to be a different kind of
enterprise than the salt-of-the-earth dime stores of the past.
DMLance