Shinder's Is Gone
7/17/2007
I wasn't around for Shinder's golden era--after all, the newsstand chain had been around since 1916 or so, founded by a clan of Russian immigrants. Their big years were back in the 1940s and '50s, when huge stacks of newspapers and magazines were sold every day. I only discovered the place back in the early 1980s, when I came down to the big city. There were two Shinder's on Block E, one at each end on the Hennepin Avenue side. One was more a comic book store, and the other more heavily tilted towards the adult entertainment end of the spectrum. Of course, since Block E was at the time one of the more rundown and adult-oriented areas of downtown Minneapolis, neither store was exactly what you'd call family-friendly. I think my mother's hair would have stood on end just going near the block. Not too long after I moved to the Cities full-time, Minneapolis finally got serious about cleaning up Block E, and bought out the various businesses to knock down the buildings. (With the notable exception of the Schubert Theater, which was a historical landmark and wound up being towed several blocks to a new location.) Shinder's moved a block or so down to a former Burger King, where the downtown location remained until now. I have good memories and bad memories of Shinder's. They cheated me severely on some comics I had to sell to have bus fare; it was company practice to lowball as much as possible for maximum markup potential. But the service was usually excellent, they hired unusual-looking people, and they were a newsstand that still had out-of-town newspapers and small-circulation magazines. But this last year, it became increasingly clear that something was wrong. Some of their ancillary merchandise sold out and wasn't replaced. The selection of magazines and newspapers shrank. Their comics came in a day late. Their junk food selection dried up. Hours of operation were cut. Finally I learned that the new owner had been too busy allegedly taking drugs and getting in trouble with the law to take care of the chain's business, and he'd failed to pay many of the vendors, and worse, the bank that held his loans. Further cuts came in, and it was hoped that one of the Shinder clan would come out of retirement to fix things. That didn't happen, and as of Monday, all the Shinder's branches are closed. The sign on the door says "closed for inventory", which I take it means that there will be some sort of fire sale or auction of the remaining stock at some point to finish paying off the bank. Adieu, Shinder's. You will be sorely missed.