To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how much I ever bought from Disney Stores when I had regular access to one, which may be part of the problem for all I know. Then again, as a child, I would have been more inclined to just spend money at Disneyland—my most cherished Disney possessions were all bought in the park, by me or by someone else—and as an adult, the only place I’ve ever lived in that had a Disney store, I was too poor to buy much when I lived there. But there was always something remarkably satisfying about spending some time wandering through the store and seeing what there was to see.

I am astonished to discover that the Disney Store we visited when I was a kid because it had just opened was the very first Disney Store, in the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, California. This was 1987, the year I turned eleven. Probably the poorest stretch of my childhood. I remember a few years later getting a Beauty and the Beast t-shirt at that store, but I’m also quite sure my grandmother paid for it. But I also remember the enormous display of stuffed animals, at least as large as the ones you’d see in most of the stores at the park except the dedicated toy section of the Emporium. For years, my mark of a proper mall was whether or not it had a Disney Store in it.

I wouldn’t have been impressed with the mall here whether it had one or not, I grant you. But I’m not sure when the mall in Tacoma stopped having one or why. We saw one in Oregon this week, when we were down in Portland for reasons, and it made me wonder when the last time I’d seen one was. I supposed, when I thought about them at all, that they’d fallen victim to online shopping. But they’re still there; while actual Disney-owned ones have declined in number, there are hundreds licensed.

Oh, I can buy Disney merchandise at JC Penney’s. The UK apparently has the “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique” at Harrod’s, which is frankly a better name anyway. But there was something pleasant about wandering the store, and in my memory, the one in Glendale was huge, easily twice the size of the average mall store if not bigger. I like online shopping, but I’m a sucker for a good brick-and-mortar store as well. This may actually be because of my childhood trips to Disneyland; the last thing we did before leaving was go to the Emporium, where we’d each be allowed to pick out one reasonably priced item. I still have at least one of them.

But not everyone had the Emporium forty-five miles away. (It tells you something about LA traffic that Google Maps lists this as an hour and a half drive at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon.) There’s not a lot about the Disneyland experience that can be reproduced in Clackamas, Oregon. Or Tacoma, Washington. Or wherever. But one of the things that can be reproduced, I guess, is the shopping experience. I acknowledge not everyone thinks reproducing that is a good thing, and goodness knows there are arguments against it. But you do nostalgia in your way, and I’ll do it in mine.

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