Wow -- a whole decade has passed since I started this blog! It's weird how ten years can feel both like a very long time, and like no time at all. In fact, as I sit here writing this, I'm actually wearing a shirt that I bought at RadioShack (of all places!) back in 2015, not long at all before The Mid-South Retail Blog began. RadioShack has all but gone by the wayside these days, but while my blog may have diminished in activity, it's at least still kicking. Thanks, as always, to all of you loyal readers out there, as well as the one-time commenters, and everyone in-between. I have lots more great content that I hope to get back into sharing over the next few months.
Here's a recap of last year's posts:
January 2024
March 2024
April 2024
May 2024
June 2024
Jackson #4 - Brandon, MS | Jitney Premier (guest post I wrote at the Sing Oil Blog)
July 2024
September 2024
October 2024
November 2024
As of this writing, the blog sits at 327,454 pageviews, and I'm grateful for each one. (Many of them are probably my own, but still!) We've also garnered more than 1,300 comments over 150+ posts. I stopped sharing my most popular posts a few years ago since there wasn't much change on that front, but it feels like 10 years is a good time to revisit that statistic, especially from the standpoint of seeing what has resonated the most over the decade. Here's the rundown:
#10
March 2016
#9
Congratulations Bass Pro Shops/City of Memphis (by l_dawg2000)
April 2015
#8
May 2018
#7
June 2020
#6
September 2019
#5
June 2015
#4
July 2016
#3
July 2017
#2
July 2019
#1
November 2019
A number of those posts are in-depth ones that I enjoyed researching and writing, and it makes me happy to see that they are continuing to find audiences in the years since they were published. The Danver's post in particular gets frequent interaction in the comments section, and of course the Seessel's endeavor was one of my very first big and exciting projects for the blog. (And I need to go back and update that Kroger list sometime!) Here's to hoping that more folks will continue to discover previous posts connecting with their interests over time, and I look forward to continuing to share more with y'all in the future! Remember that you can always hit me up anytime in the comments or by email at midsouthretailblog [at] gmail [dot] com, and sincere thanks, again, for 10 great years.
Until next time, have fun exploring the retail world wherever you are :)
Retail Retell
Happy anniversary! This is a big anniversary too! There aren't too many blogs which make it a full decade while still being updated, but here we are! While I have reduced my interest in retail due to the sad state of current retail (RadioShack! Things were more interesting a decade ago and prior...), and that has affected my blog reading, I'm still checking the blogs out regularly and hope to see them continue!
ReplyDeleteHa, I'm not surprised that the most-read blog post here is a Kroger one! I'm also not surprised that the Kroger Neon decor guide is the most popular of the Kroger decor guides. It would be my choice too, though I'd have to cover my eyes once it gets to the fake neon! Maybe I sent a few visitors to that page during The Year of Kroger at HHR!
It's kind of hard to believe there wasn't a Kroger post on here last year, but oh well. My favorite blog post from the past year might be easy to guess. Yes, it is the one from Dallas with the Half Price Books and 99 Cents Only (I'll ignore the HEB part, lol). Texas retail, Retail Retell style! I know that post got some people in the Houston retail enthusiast community excited as well.
I'll provide a little bit of a surprise though, I think my second favorite post was the Roses Express one, and specifically that photo in there of the telephone stand! You might think that is a strange thing to remember, but I remember posting a comment about my copper line landland service. No more than two or three weeks later, I got a letter from AT&T saying they were discontinuing copper line landlines in my area. I did change my landline carrier to the cable company's VoIP type service though so my landline phones are alive and well, albeit now active via VoIP rather than traditional POTS lines. Oh well, adding the landline service only added something like $1.76 to my cable bill due to the bundle savings and it has way more features. I can actually call long distance from my landline without fees now! Isn't the 21st century grand? Lol
But, anyway, that whole affair got me thinking about landline telephones and retail. Believe it or not, when AT&T started to allow people to buy their own phones instead of renting them from the phone company in the late 1970s, it set off a retail boom for telephones which really peaked around 1983-4 when AT&T was broken up. I did a lot of research on that and found some interesting stuff, including videos on the landline phone-retail subject. It's probably far too esoteric for any kind of blog post as I'm sure I'm the only one interested in such things!
What I did find of interest to this blog is that, and you're probably too young to remember this, the old classic AT&T Western Electric desk phones used by homes and offices during the mandated renting of phones period of the 1970s and earlier are still being made! AT&T licensed their phone designs to some independent phone companies, ITT being one of them. ITT made their licensed phones in the town of Corinth, MS in the ~1960s and eventually that division, Cortelco, became independent and they still make those classic phones. Many models are still made in Corinth, MS! Link: https://www.cortelco.com/categories.php?file=basic
So if you have any friends or family with a landline, maybe you should tell them to buy a Cortelco telephone and put it on a Roses phone stand! But, yeah, that Roses photo kind of indirectly started that telephone retail research that I was engaged in for a month or two after that!
Thanks Anonymous! I appreciate the kind words and I appreciate that you are still reading even with a decreased interest in retail. (Hopefully it can grow back one day!)
DeleteYou know what, I feel like you used to be able to check that stat on Blogger (sources of incoming pageviews) -- looks like that may be gone now, though. I wouldn't doubt that a lot of that post's pageviews came from your HHR links, though!
Ha, I'm not surprised that one was your favorite for the year! But wow, I wouldn't have expected the Roses post to be your second! I do remember your comment about the telephone stand though, and that is an interesting coincidence that your service ended up being discontinued shortly after. I want to say l_dawg2000 experienced a similar service discontinuation within the last year or two, I wonder if his was the same thing. Anyway, glad the new service has worked out for you, and wow -- that's pretty awesome about that style of phones still being manufactured in Corinth! I visited Corinth for the first time over the holidays, it's a really cool place. I saw a decent amount of stuff, but can't say I came across Cortelco -- but nice to know it's there!
Congrats on 10 years!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteCongrats on the 10th Blogiversary! Nice to see the dedication to stick around for that long, even if the posting schedule has been a bit off and on of late. Looking to see what else you'll have to share on the blog in the future as well! (And I still think that Radio Shack shirt is really neat!)
ReplyDeleteThanks friend!
DeleteCongratulations on the milestone! I may not have been around for all 10 years, but I have enjoyed the ones when I have known about your blog. Thanks for helping me out with the Brandon Sing post, and thanks for hosting me last year so I could write my recent Jackson post!
ReplyDeleteThank you friend!
DeleteHey, looks like I might actually get a comment posted correctly (under l_dawg2000) for a change! Seems Blogger doesn't want to play nice with my Samsung browser on my (still going strong) Motorola phone, switching to the Chrome browser might have done the trick.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, congratulations on the 10 year milestone! Like your first commentor to this post, I too have lost significant interest in retail as a hobby lately. Talk about sad states on that front: the recent simultaneous losses of Big Lots and Bargain Hunt, with JoAnn soon to follow, surely seem to be pointing towards a diminished future for the state of retail in and around the Southaven area.
Hopefully Big Lots can make a return, that would be a nice shot in the arm for Stateline Rd / Main St. I didn't make it to the Big Lots closing, but did get to visit Bargain Hunt in it's (miserable) last few days - a place that didn't seem to get much restocking at all during its liquidation. Really going to miss Bargain Hunt, as they would have some unique finds on keto-friendly products from time to time.
I think I really started losing interest (for some reason) when Walmart declined to remodel every single store in the area nearly identically, though the Horn Lake store was curiously redone inside very similar to West Memphis (flat style aisle signs, but big blue letters that aren't attached to the wall), and exterior wise it basically only received a logo change. (Seems like they tried to get by on the cheap there, but it actually looks pretty OK in my opinion, while I still can't bring myself to be a fan of that gray they put all over the outside of the Hernando Walmart) :P
So yeah, 10 years is certainly a great achievement, especially when it comes to anything at all in the digital realm! I have a coworker who is trying to make money off of podcasting, think he's off to a slow start on that front, while me - I'm just now catching up to smart watches :P (My new Fitbit Inspire 3 is super cool, even if it is literally the cheapest name brand smart watch out there). I told myself I would never (ever) have a need for one of those, and now I'm saying the same thing about smart rings, which of course means sometime in the future I'll probably have one of those too XD
Congratulations once again my friend :)
It did indeed -- nice! And thank you, friend!! I appreciate all the kind words :)
DeleteYeah, all these chains going under definitely doesn't make for a rosy state of things in retailsphere. Of those, Bargain Hunt is for sure the one I'll miss the most. I was actually hoping they'd take over some locations around here (as they've never been in the Jackson area) -- I wasn't expecting them to go out of business, too! That one came as more of a shock to me than Big Lots and JoAnn.
I visited both Stateline stores and hope to have a post eventually. In what hopefully is good news for the Big Lots, I found on Reddit a list of all the stores reopening under Variety and Southaven is included -- I wasn't expecting that, having originally seen it as one of the leases Variety didn't grab. I suppose that could still change, and who knows how similar or good the "new" Big Lots will be, but hopefully it all works out for the chain in general and for the Southaven store specifically. I do find it pretty cool that two of the very first stores to reopen (next week, April 10) will be in Mississippi -- I intend to revisit Pearl ASAP, and Tupelo soon as well if I am up that way for work, although I'm not really expecting anything to really blow me away (I've also already been to both locations before, Pearl many times as it is my local store and Tupelo last fall on a similar work trip).
I don't think I even realized the Horn Lake Walmart had remodeled -- interesting that its interior signage is slightly different from the rest. Walmart has definitely been on a big remodel kick this last year or two, as both Ridgeland and Madison, which were still stuck in Impact mode, remodeled to Airport. I think Canton still has Cheap Impact, though. I haven't been inside the Hernando store much since its remodel, but the times I've driven past it, the gray has grown on me somewhat -- I'm very glad they left the brick alone, at least!
Anyway, I can't blame you for a diminishing interest in the hobby -- I feel like I'm in danger of getting to that point sometime too, which is why I don't mind really slowing down in content (as if I force myself to produce more when I really don't want to, that won't end well). The unfortunate flip side of that is that I feel I have so much content I keep getting further and further behind on, that I really do want to share! But honestly it feels like the immediate interaction just isn't there anymore like it used to be, at least on flickr anyway, and definitely that's something I am to blame for too as I don't like using flickr on my phone so I only ever respond to comments when I do get them four days later when I'm back on my laptop to upload again. Sigh.
All that said, thanks again! And good luck with your new smartwatch, haha (let me know when you start your own podcast!)