I want to show you a really interesting store today, in Woodbridge, Virginia, along the old Route 1 corridor. This is not the nicest part of Northern Virginia; much of Woodbridge is newer, but the Route 1 corridor is a series of aging shopping centers and other old commercial buildings, plus lots of traffic.
I guess calling it “not nice” is a little, well, not nice; it’s more that it feels inhospitable, one of those environments you wouldn’t want to be outside of a car in, but also not inside of a car.
However, I’ve found that places like this are often quite interesting if you keep your eyes open. (This store I wrote about here was also in Woodbridge, for example.)
This is the shopping center today’s store, L&Y Electronics, is in:
That’s what a lot of the stuff along here looks like. The buildings are quite generic, but there are lots of smaller commercial spaces in them, and lots of independent businesses.
I don’t remember how I found L&Y, but I was reading about computer stores, and I was thinking about stores I remember as a kid, that sold video games and electronics and computer stuff. I remember them being packed with all kinds of stuff. They were sensory delights (if you found that sort of thing interesting). Today stores of that nature tend to be very spare and minimalist.
I suppose that’s because we just have fewer physical hardware and software products these days. Computers are smaller and do more, there are fewer weird parts and peripherals, video games are often digital codes, etc.
L&Y caught my attention because it looked, from the online reviews, like the kind of store I remember as a kid. It looked like something that was once fairly common, and is now extremely rare. I like those kinds of things, which become unusual simply by persisting when the rest don’t.
So let me show you what this store looks like inside.