Huh, this is interesting: according to an article in yesterday’s Trib about the Media Play situation, MP was one of the first specialized big-box stores (as opposed to more generalized big-boxes like WalMart and K-Mart) to arrive in Utah, preceding Best Buy, Circuit City, and Barnes and Noble. I either didn’t realize that, or had forgotten it. Big-boxes are so common these days, it’s hard to remember the way the landscape used to be without them.

And here’s another little factoid: the first MP opened here in Novemeber 1993. It seems like they’ve been here a lot longer than that, and now I find myself struggling to remember where I used to go for all my media needs. I used to buy CDs at a locally-owned shop (now unfortunately defunct) called Tom-Tom Music, but I’ll be damned if I can remember where I bought my movies — Fred Meyer, maybe. Which, by the way, was acquired not too long ago by the Smith’s grocery-store chain and became Smith’s Marketplace, a move which did not impress yours truly. But come to think of it, a lot of the Fred Meyer stores used to be Grand Central stores back in the ’80s, before they were bought out themselves, and I didn’t care much for that change either. I remember that my friend Keith had a theory at the time that communists were attempting to demoralize we Americans by buying up all of our familiar stores and giving them new, lame-sounding names. And so it goes in the land of corporate takeovers and brutal retail attrition. I only wish someone knew what to do with the big empty buildings after the businesses fold, instead of leaving them to rot…