I saw this photo
recently at Trader Joe's near San Francisco's Fisherman's wharf. The
photo is the original Cost Plus. There is a current Cost-Plus 25 feet
away from the original location, and much bigger.
Cost Plus is very important to those of us who love commerce. It is nearly a religious icon.
America before Cost Plus, circa 1958, was a retail world made up of two or three products in many lines of consumer goods. A god-damn sterile shopping world with products from a small number of big companies.
Cost
Plus opened America to the world. It found and imported a great
variety of low cost, quality, useful products from around the world.
It turned a narrow, barren, bigoted, virgin American shopping world
into a lusty, vigorous, enjoyable, open minded universe of excitement.
On a related subject, I read Virginia Postrel's blog. Virginia occasionally mentions how fortunate we are to have so many consumer products available to us in America. That is complete nonsense Virginia. Until you have visited a Tokyo department store, and particularly Tokyu Hands, you have no idea what consumer choice is. For every product we have on an American retail shelf, the Japanese have four times as many.