Or, Hills is where the toys were.
Recently on the Retro Network podcast, Jason and Mickey talked about stores from their childhoods. Take a listen to Episode 10 if you haven’t already.
I was listening and yelling to the hosts, Jason and Mickey, hoping through time and space they could hear my cries. The discussion about the late Hills Department Store brought up so many thoughts and feelings. I had to add my experience and knowledge to the memories.
When I was a young child of the ’80s the closest mall was an hour away in Syracuse, NY. There were stores downtown like JC Penny’s and Sears. The outer road of town held Nichols, Ames, and Zeyhr’s. Suddenly the news broke. The far upstate town of Watertown was getting its own mall. The rest of the mall would not be ready yet, but the first anchor store announced opening day. The commercials started. Sugar Ray Leonard would be signing autographs. Hills had arrived.
Hills quickly became THE store for any kid. The star was the toys, of course. I can remember multiple GI Joe toys all the way up to Image Comics’ Cyberforce for sale on the shelves. Shelves which hid many many toys. Hidden because mom told me and my brother that if that toy was still here next time she would buy it. So we hid that toy behind a bigger toy on a high shelf. I can still remember how that store was set up. All of the twists and turns to get to the toy department. Or the boys’ clothes. Video games and movies. School supplies. I’m sure there were other things like housewares, women’s clothing, linens. Not a bit of that in my memories. But I remember the order of bikes, girls toys, boy toys, clearance.
Years later I was hired to work at that same store. My second job ever. Twice. At first, I was hired to be a night crew grunt for a remodel. Move shelves, clean this, carry items over to the new area. Two weeks later I was out a job for a few days until Hills brought me on to the daylight hours. I jumped quickly from regular cashier to the layaway section.
In the 1990s during the height of comic book and toy speculation I was on the front lines. Not only a fan and collector but also because Hills would bring all new cases to the layaway department. I had to open up fresh boxes of Star Wars, Marvel, whatever and hold up the figures lottery style. Here are case fresh rare toys in my hands. That’s when I discovered the hoarding of that community. I hold up a Slave Girl Princess Leia. The hottest toy in the land, according to Toyfare magazine. The next man in the lottery passes on it. “I already have ten.” Ah. That explains why I can’t find one. Mine now but your accumulation kind of puts a damper on my enjoyment.
While this access to toys should have been enough to keep me working at the store, I was soon for the exit. As was the company. This is where I began to study the ins and outs of retail. To see the signs of failure before that news goes public. Here is what I discovered while working at Hills during their failure.
There are two things that stores immediately get rid of in order to save costs. Bags and magazines. Think of any store you have shopped at that is now gone. Months before other signs surface the employees will be instructed to ask shoppers if they actually need a bag. I saw it at Borders, I’ve seen it at local grocery stores. And Hills ran out of bags except for giant ones for pillows. One week before Thanksgiving. At a time before everyone had reusable bags in their trunks.
The other dump is magazines. Magazines don’t have as high a profit as other products, plus necessitate a fast turn over and a person to stock them. Eliminating the product also saves this payroll. If you ever see magazines disappear from the cash register lines at your local deli, the store is in trouble.
Later, Hills chose to rearrange the stores. Give a fresh coat of paint. Look like this new up and comer department store called WalMart. Instead of emphasizing what Hills had that was special, they instead chose to copy Sam Walton’s vision. Gone was the popcorn snack bar. Worse, the toy section was greatly de-emphasized. Hills is where the toys are. This was the mantra for a generation. Now Hills became, where are the toys? The entire section that was a calling card now appeared on a milk carton.
When none of these desperate attempts worked, Hills was bought out by one of their competitors. Ames.
I have a trick for any of you who grew up with an Ames nearby. I can describe your store. Leaky ceiling. Warped floors. What magazines and books that were left were not upfront as they are in most stores, but tucked in the back of a forgotten aisle. Some teenager or early 20’s boy was looking all surly at the electronics cash register. Quietly judging you. It’s not worth it to find an employee to help because you’re both aware they don’t care. Chances are I have never set foot into the Ames you remember, and yet I described it to a tee.
When a store with this glowing image is in better financial shape than it’s competitor, there is no coming back. In the modern-day it would be akin to K-Mart buying JC Penny’s. A retail version of dividing by zero.
For those glorious perfect years though, Hills was the greatest store for a child. It felt like everything promised in Miracle on 34th Street. One of the greatest losses to our kids today is they will never have a store that is “theirs”. Not one of our sons and daughters will be writing a blog in 2039 about their Amazon memories.
I was one of the original employees of the Watertown NY Hills Store. We started before it opened the summer of 1986. I was a cashier. We got paid in cash. Their thinking was if we had cash in hand we would go back down into the store and spend it. I often did!! I had fun working there.
Thank you for the write-up and sharing your memories.
I have very similar memories myself. I will never forget the layout of my local Hills store in Pennsylvania. You entered the double swinging doors and into the snack lobby. Here you would find it BUSTLING with people hanging out at one of the tables enjoying a snack or simply conversing over a cigarette (yes, smoking inside was still allowed in the 80s).
You are so right about “hiding” toys behind other items on the shelf with the hopes that they would still be there next week when you had enough money saved! I do remember my mom using Lay-a-way for our Christmas gifts a couple of times. I think it only cost $5 to have them hold your items?
Another vivid memory that I had was Halloween time. Hills was where the costumes are! I am talking QUALITY costumes of rubber masks with battery operated light-up eyes. The kinds of masks that would cost you $100-$200 today were a plenty in Hills. They had monster arms you wore like gloves and cloth costumes unlike the cheap, plastic ones that ushered in the 90s.
Thank you again for sharing your Hills memories and for rekindling mine.
You may be surprised but as a child of the 80’s and a Canadian, I myself have some nice memories of Hills. I grew up in Kingston, Ontario and would travel to Watertown, NY, to get our school clothes and supplies for each new year. I loved the drive, over the causeway and the quaint town that was Watertown. We stopped at Hills everytime. The smell of the vestibule. The hotdogs, pop and even the counter where I would exchange the Canadian dollars that my parents would give us, to American dollars. Hills holds some of my greatest memories. And I will never forget the smell of those hotdogs.💕
Dexter was a fantastic place too😁
Thank you for the write-up and sharing your memories.
I have very similar memories myself. I will never forget the layout of my local Hills store in Pennsylvania. You entered the double swinging doors and into the snack lobby. Here you would find it BUSTLING with people hanging out at one of the tables enjoying a snack or simply conversing over a cigarette (yes, smoking inside was still allowed in the 80s).
You are so right about “hiding” toys behind other items on the shelf with the hopes that they would still be there next week when you had enough money saved! I do remember my mom using Lay-a-way for our Christmas gifts a couple of times. I think it only cost $5 to have them hold your items?
Another vivid memory that I had was Halloween time. Hills was where the costumes are! I am talking QUALITY costumes of rubber masks with battery operated light-up eyes. The kinds of masks that would cost you $100-$200 today were a plenty in Hills. They had monster arms you wore like gloves and cloth costumes unlike the cheap, plastic ones that ushered in the 90s.
Thank you for sharing your Hills memories and for rekindling mine.
I love this, thank you for writing this and I had no idea the first signs a store is in trouble is when the bags and magazines go, but I’ve seen it happen so I know you’re right.
I was born in 1979 and my local Hills was an hour away across the state line in Kingsport Tennessee. I loved that store, our toy department there had end caps that had playsets complete with the action figures set up behind this heavy thick see thru plastic wrap, so it let you know what you were getting and what it would look like if you had all the figures. I still remember the smell from the snackbar as soon as you’d go thru the door. When I was an infant I was born with a club foot, my mom had them break it and reset the bone placing it in a cast when I was 3 months old, after that until I was at least 2 years old I had to wear these special shoes for that one foot that were made and bought thru Hills Department store. I still have those lil shoes somewhere, one was just a plain shoe to match the one that was medically needed so my foot didn’t grow back the wrong way. I remember layways at Christmas, back to school shopping and I remember getting this plush New Kids on the Block Joe doll from Hills in around 1990 or 1991. The Hills was attached to an old mall that’s now long gone (torn down and replaced with East Stone Commons strip mall type stores) but the old mall was called Kingsport Mall and it made it to at least 2002. Hills was one anchor that opened up into the mall and the other was Montgomery Wards (a store I don’t remember as well because I don’t think my parents liked it as much as Sears/JC Penneys) and then there were other lil stores inside the mall along with a two screen movie theater called the Martin Twin I remember in the mid 1980s or around the time the original Karate Kid movie came out that as soon as you walked out from Hills into the mall on your left was a store that sold all kinds of Karate/Bruce Lee things and I still have throwing stars from that store. Some that are just plain and a set of them that folds inside a faux leather snap up case that can go on a belt (I still have them but I think they’re illegal now) I also have one of those flick out batons made of steel with a steel ball on the end from that store.
Last summer my neighbors who moved here to VA from SC and once had a consignment store there brought in all kinds of stuff for yard sales. In it I found still new with tags clothing from Hills, including some red shorts made by Shenanagens or some weird name like that. I bought everything they had that had come from hills, including this cute made especially for Hills Christmas figure of a bear with a puppy and on the bottom is the Hills logo and still on the box is the Hills price tag.
Oh what I wouldn’t give to be able to go back to 1988/89 and live it all over again. Hills was my favorite store as a kid and to this day it still is. I’ll never forget it. Now with Hills gone and Toys R Us as well you’re right, kids today have no store just for them.
Ames took over our Hills in Kingsport TN and it went downhill, I only remember being in Ames twice and it was always a mess of a store. Dirty, merch in disaray, and yes the roof leaked as their were buckets, I never fooled with their electronics department even thou that was the age I was in at the time having just graduated high school when they took over. We took my aunt who moved back from NC to Ames once and she stayed for hours and that store was the most miserable store I’ve ever been inside. The only other time I remember being in Ames was I spent a few dollars trying to and succeeding to win a James Dean keychain I still have from the stop on the red light game up front.
I wish HIlls would have downsized and survived even if just as a regional department store. Here around me a regional one called Magic Mart managed to make it until almost or right at 2019 I believe. So it made it longer than Hills even though it was a much smaller in number store. To this day I’ll never like Ames, because for me Ames killed Hills, when I know it was probably corporate that did it in trying to grow too fast.