Goodbye Hecht's

One of the last Washington/Baltimore homegrown chains will be no more. It will disapear into the minds of people, along with Woodward and Lothrop, Garfinkels, Dart Drug, Jumbo Food, Hot Shoppes Cafeterias, Hechingers, People's Drug, Lansburgh's, Hutzler's, Crown Books, Sutton Place Gourmet, Erols Video, Drug Fair, and Waxie Maxie's. Each have been bought out or been forced out of business. Even the Nextel cellular provider has been purchased by Sprint, who knows if they will be around much longer in their current form. Federated's impending merger with May Company will leave Hechts to become Macys, and will involve the closing of the Wheaton, White Marsh, Owings Mills and Marley Station (Glen Burnie) Hecht's locations. It's sad to see one of the last DC/Baltimore region chains disapear. I bet that the Baltimore area stores to close end up as either Boscov's, Bloomingdales or Lord and Taylor. Federated has not yet decided anything (at least in the public's eye) for the Lord and Taylor chain, though I suspect they may become Bloomingdales. However, White Flint Mall in Bethesda has both a Lord and Taylor and a Bloomingdales. Will Lord and Taylor disapear too? Time will tell. While it's sad that the DC area has none of it's home grown chains left, we still have AOL and XM to call their roots to DC. And for the time being, that may be the best we can do.

And I bid everyone a good night.