The five-and-dime had a smell you could not have manufactured on purpose. Sawdust on hardwood floors. Cheap candles near the front. Something chocolatey from the candy counter at the back. The smell hit you when the door opened and followed you around every aisle until you left.

But let's start before the smell. Let's start with what the store actually was.

What It Was

Woolworth's. Kresge's. McCrory's. Ben Franklin. TG&Y. The names varied by region, and the sizes ranged from a single narrow storefront to a full block of retail space, but the concept was the same across all of them. A five-and-dime was a variety store organized around the idea that most of what a person needed on a daily basis cost very little, and that a single store should carry all of it.

Thread, buttons, bobby pins, combs. Potting soil and seed packets in spring. Greeting cards ranked in long wire racks. Fabric by the yard. Sewing notions in shallow drawers behind the notions counter. Cleaning supplies, dish towels, rubber gloves. School supplies -- the good kind, the kind that smelled like fresh rubber erasers and brand-new composition notebooks. Toys that were modest enough to be impulse purchases. Candy by the piece at the candy counter, with a scale.

The price ceiling that gave the stores their name had dissolved by the 1950s -- prices had outrun the nickel and dime category during and after the war -- but the original logic remained: everything should be accessible, and a person with very little money should still be able to buy something useful here. The store was organized around that promise.

The Lunch Counter

The lunch counter at a five-and-dime was a separate institution inside the institution. A row of stools along a counter, sometimes eight stools, sometimes twenty. A laminated menu on a stand. A woman in a white or pale blue uniform who knew the coffee order of every regular without being told.

You could eat cheaply and sit for a while. The lunch counter served pie, always. It served grilled cheese and tomato soup. It served a hamburger that was done through and not anything like the hamburgers now sold in places that put pickled onions on things. The coffee was in a glass pot and refilled without ceremony.

The lunch counter was also, in the 1960s, the site of the sit-in movement. Black Americans in cities across the South, particularly young people, sat at counters that had refused to serve them and waited. Greensboro was the most famous. The Woolworth's on South Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina, where four Black college students sat down on February 1, 1960, and asked to be served, and were not served, and stayed. Within weeks the tactic had spread to dozens of cities. Within months, the segregated lunch counter was breaking across the South.

The five-and-dime lunch counter, in other words, was where some of the defining confrontations of American civil rights actually happened. The counter was the flash point because the counter was the place that most visibly performed the logic of segregation: a public place of commerce that refused to serve paying customers based on race. When the counter integrated, the store integrated with it.

It is worth knowing this about the thing being remembered.

What the Store Did for People With Very Little Money

A five-and-dime was one of the few retail environments where you could walk in with thirty-five cents and make a real purchase. Not a token purchase. A useful one. A spool of white thread. A pack of needles. Two birthday candles. A birthday card. A single piece of sheet music from the sheet music rack. A toy for a child who was not expecting much that day.

The store was organized around the possibility of ordinary purchases made by people without much purchasing power. It did not presume that you would spend a lot, or that you had come in to spend a lot. It did not make you feel poor for buying only one thing.

This was a particular kind of retail dignity, and it was not accidental. The Woolworth's model had been built, from the beginning, around the fixed-price principle -- the original five-cent and ten-cent counters were arranged so that customers could walk through and see prices without having to ask, which eliminated the negotiation that had, in older dry-goods stores, often been used to extract more money from customers who didn't know better or couldn't advocate for themselves. The five-and-dime democratized retail in a lasting way.

What Replaced It

Kmart opened its first store in 1962. Target opened its first store the same year. Walmart, in a modest way, started the same year too, in Rogers, Arkansas. The category they created -- the discount department store -- was enormous, cheaper in many cases, and offered far more selection than any five-and-dime could.

The five-and-dimes tried to compete. Kresge became Kmart. But the stores that stayed five-and-dimes -- the Ben Franklins, the McCrorys, the independent variety stores -- could not match the buying power or the floor space of the discount giants. The last Woolworth's in the United States closed in 1997.

The Honest Part

Here is the honest part, because nostalgia writing that skips this part isn't worth reading.

The five-and-dime was segregated, in many states, in ways that went beyond the lunch counter. Black customers in the South were sometimes served at separate counters, or not served at all in certain departments, or followed by store employees on the assumption of shoplifting. The retail dignity described above was not equally available to everyone.

The merchandise was often cheap in the other sense of the word -- badly made, poorly finished, designed to be bought again when it broke. The candy was good. The toys frequently were not, and the frustration of a toy that broke in two days was a recurring feature of five-and-dime childhood.

The stores also, in many cases, treated their employees the way low-margin retail has always treated employees: low wages, erratic hours, minimal benefits, management that rotated and did not stay. The woman behind the lunch counter who knew everyone's coffee order was not being paid particularly well for knowing it.

None of this is an argument that the store deserved to disappear. It is an argument for seeing the store clearly. A thing can be worth missing and worth criticizing at the same time.

What Was Thrown Away

When Walmart replaced the five-and-dime, it replaced it with a store that was larger, cheaper on most items, and open longer hours. These are genuine improvements. But the things that did not transfer are worth naming.

The first is scale. A five-and-dime was a store a person could stand in the center of and understand. The whole store was visible. You knew, roughly, where everything was. The big-box store is not like this. It is organized to be navigated with a cart, not browsed on foot, and the experience of browsing has largely been replaced by the experience of locating.

The second is the lunch counter. Walmart does not have a lunch counter. Target does not have a lunch counter. The Woolworth's lunch counter, for all its complicated history, was a place where you sat next to whoever else needed lunch that day and ate a meal and left without much fuss. There is no retail equivalent of this anywhere in current American commerce.

The third is the store as neighborhood institution. The five-and-dime on Main Street was owned, sometimes, by local people, or managed by people who stayed in the same store for twenty years and knew their customers. The Walmart is managed by someone who may be transferred next year, staffed by employees who may not stay, and owned by shareholders in another state. The transaction is more efficient and the relationship is thinner.

The fourth is what the store said about who counted as a customer. A store organized around modest purchases made by people with limited money says something about who it believes belongs in commerce. A store that requires a car, a cart, and thirty or forty dollars minimum to make a practical trip says something different.

What's Left

There are still Ben Franklin stores, a few hundred of them, mostly in towns the big boxes never reached. There are independent variety stores that have survived because they serve communities the chains don't reach. There are dollar stores, which serve some of the same population but in a stripped-down way that carries none of the browsing pleasure or the counter service or the lunch.

Some towns have converted old five-and-dime buildings into other things. The building in many American downtowns is still there -- the wide storefront, the tin ceiling, the original tile floor -- now home to a boutique or a restaurant or an antique mall. The bones of the store outlasted its business model.

The Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, the original one, is now at the Smithsonian. Which is right. It belongs there.

Did you have a five-and-dime in your town? Do you remember what you used to buy there? Tell us in the comments -- we'd love to hear.