List of Defunct Chain or Independent Stores and Restaurants that Operated in Southern California, 1979-2015

Just because I like making lists, here are a number of stores and restaurants I remember that are now dead.

Doodleburgers (possibly also "Doodle Burgers"): Wonky chain of San Diego hamburger restaurants with tables that had Converse shoes on their feet and other late-70s/early-80s gimcrackery. Had a restaurant on India Street and one on Alvarado Road in La Mesa; possibly others. Vanished sometime in the mid-1980s. Decent hamburgers.

Fedmart: What Target is now, Fedmart was in the 1970s; big-box store that sold all the big-box stuff. The ones I saw had green exteriors with a white stripe and an "auditorium" staggered-half cone opening instead of the crappier overhangs you would see during the '80s.

Food Basket: Yeah I know they were always Albertsons, but the one I would go to as a child was stuck in the 1970s deep into the 1980s, before it was remodeled and renamed. The cheesy wall clock in the back never worked, they sold Mexican food out of racks with cheap flowery metalwork, they tried to sell women's clothing in a corner that later became a deli, they sold the generic food later featured in Repo Man (1984).

Carlos Murphy's: Part of the miasma of '80s/'90s chain restaurants where the food was OK but all the real effort was in the decor. Fake wooden Japanese Zeros "smashed" through the walls, tin ceilings painted oddly, a space for a live band, joke photos - Buca di Beppo does the same thing now, but it's all Italian instead of '80s mishmash. The one I mostly went to has now become Casa de Pico in La Mesa.

Federated: Never went there (because all the stores were in Los Angeles), but I saw all their ads on KTLA. Those spots were where a young Shadoe Stevens got to show off his alleged weirdness; Federated was a chain of electronics stores.

Fotomat: We had a number of the little photo dropoff-pickup booths, and more then one became a keygrinder shop afterward.

Crown Books: Very much the Borders of the 1980s, Crown Books (mocked as "Clown Books" on Larry Himmel's San Diego at Large TV show) was a stock '80s bookstore selling paperbacks, maps, role-playing games on a back shelf, etc. Weirdly, the name was recycled to liquidate books years after the chain died in the 1990s; in the early 2000s they took over a number of locations in San Diego with the Crown Books logo on a plastic tarp sign hung outside and on a back wall. The liquidator Crown sold framed posters and classic music CDs on top of the coffee table tomes and softcover "serious" books.

Home Federal Savings and Loan: Yes, we had a number of those after the chain went under in 1992. A two-building set (banking and loans) remain as ruins in the "Mad Max mall" on the corner of Austin Drive and Sweetwater Road as of this writing. La Mesa had one that was later a barbecue grill store and a preschool after that.

Family Foods: The reason why the "Mad Max mall" went south (beyond negligent management); this was the other supermarket in that stripmall. They had a Vons that became a church, but this supermarket remained open as part of the "Family Foods" mini-chain until they went under in 2008. After that, the mall began to look more and more ragged because the only goods stores were a liquor store/bodega and a pizza parlor. Some of the storefronts are now storage for costume places. It's less like a mall and more like a tenants' hotel for non-commercial spaces.

California Electronics & Industrial Supply: Wonderfully dirty electronics surplus place in El Cajon. Tube sockets, transformers, automation equipment, cable, nuts, bolts, washers, boxes, etc. Died three our four years ago. Down the same street is Murphy's Surplus, which does much of the same thing, but with a lot more of a military-surplus communications angle.

Waldenbooks: They morphed into Barnes & Nobels, which sells the same stuff. Every mall had one in the '80s and early '90s.

Tommy McGees: A "comedy restaurant" where the waiters wore goofy costumes and made wisecracks. Came and went in the mid-1980s. Another short-term La Mesa eatery.

Short-Term Rummage Stores: A phenomena that seems to have vanished, these were storefronts that sold cheap used clothes and other secondhand crapola, but only for a month or two. I saw one in Casa de Oro (in a since-demolished storefront.) During the Bush II years, there were a number of short-term overstock sellers pushing suitcases and umbrellas, all nameless and gone in three months.

Haggens/Vons: The reason why this list was made; these douchebags bought up all the functioning Vons stores in San Diego county, renamed them, then decided to shut everything down after a poor summer. Screw these guys!