For more than a century, movies in Marion, Indiana, were a shared ritual. The recent closure of the city’s AMC Classic 12 didn’t just mark the loss of another business; it ended a long local tradition that once made filmgoing easy, communal, and close to home. I’m not from Marion, but I still mourn its loss.

If you’re not familiar with Meijer, it’s a Midwestern chain of superstores that are basically a much better Walmart. Be it said that I love Meijer! I’d probably get a Meijer tattoo across my bicep if it had the necessary real estate. I’ve written about the chain before, but today’s subject is a thirty-two-year-old VHS tape titled A Video Tour of Your New Meijer Stores!

I’d imagine that driving from New Castle to Muncie on State Road 3 isn’t generous if you’re behind the wheel of a big rig. Only precious few places exist where a trucker can safely pull off for supplies! You’re doing pretty well if you can shoehorn a semi into the postage-stamp parking lot at the Shell on County Road 200, but you’re a downright wizard if you can hold out another fourteen miles to Muncie’s Murphy Oi!. Decades earlier, drivers had another option: just off the highway near Cowan, the Idle Hour truck stop existed for one simple reason: it understood the problem and answered it.

When I was a kid, I remember heading toward my dad’s house near Elkhart and passing a Walmart on the right just as another Walmart appeared on the left. To my young mind, Goshen must have been some kind of booming metropolis if it needed two of the superstores practically across the street from each other! Before long, though, the older one was replaced by a movie theater. Today, that same building is a church. It’s funny how places reinvent themselves.