Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Family Christian Stores Closing

As busy as I am with studies and a sermon this Sunday (Sorry I haven’t been blogging.), I cannot let pass that Family Christian Stores is closing.  And by closing, I mean all of their stores are closing.

I haven’t been in a Family Christian Store for years.  One near by closed some time back.  But I was very familiar with them in the early 2000’s as I promoting my first book.  As both a customer and an author, I saw they had serious problems.  Don’t get me even started on one manager I had to deal with at two stores.  He was lazy and treated authors horribly.

As for their merchandise, at too many FCS stores, most of it was junk.  I would follow the late, great Keith Green and call it Jesus Junk, but so much of it either had little to do with Jesus or was downright heretical.  It was just junk.

Now perhaps they improved their franchise later, but it was too late.  Hastings suffered that fate.  Once boring, they became a great place to visit and shop, but went bankrupt and closed anyway.  I always liked Borders, but they went bust years ago.  Amazon has devoured much of the brick-and-mortar retail business, good stores and bad.


Anyway, Family Christian Stores used to be an important part of evangelical culture for good or for ill.  And now, they will soon be gone.

1 comment:

OldSouth said...

You are actually kind in your assessment of the firm. I had some experience in earlier mis-spent days as a record label supplier to this firm. It was, shall we say, not a positive experience.

It's good to see them go. They were flogging sub-Christian trash to a customer base they basically saw as marks from which to harvest cash.