We all know how the advent of the internet makes things so much easier to find. Yet there is one area where the net makes things a little tougher: finding old business locations. A subset of urban archaeology if you will.
My primary example is, on another board, I and some others were trying to find all the former Friendly's locations. Besides personal memory, my main sources were: a leaflet from the early '80s that they gave out at Friendly's which listed all of their locations, and an old business-only phone directory on CD-ROM (remember those?) from the late '90s. Today, due to the internet, neither of these sources are still available; if you want a restaurant's locations, you just go to their website and look them up. And for business locations, there's Switchboard.com if not just plain Google. But for both sources, when a business closes, moves, or changes names, the websites are (usually) updated ASAP. How many sources does the internet have for finding where a business used to be?
The same can be said about newspapers and magazines going all-digital. You can look up back issues of print versions in the library, sometimes going back decades, either in bound volumes or on microfilm (see also Google News Archive), but will you be able to do the same in the future with today's digital editions? True, there's the Wayback Machine.
(For those not familiar, Friendly's is a Mass.-based chain of casual restaurants that place special emphasis on their ice cream. They are largely located in the northeast and midwest, but their numbers have diminished greatly over the past 20 years. The restaurants had a unique colonial wood-and-brick architecture, recognizable as many of the closed but still-standing Friendly stores are in use as everything from churches to doctor's offices!)
Here's one former Friendly's:
https://www.google.com/maps?ll=39.961014,-74.199611&spn=0.000004,0.00327&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=39.960917,-74.200099&panoid=D7y3Wbim0Fly1NaqTAIfAA&cbp=12,231.59,,0,2.19 (https://www.google.com/maps?ll=39.961014,-74.199611&spn=0.000004,0.00327&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=39.960917,-74.200099&panoid=D7y3Wbim0Fly1NaqTAIfAA&cbp=12,231.59,,0,2.19)
And here's another:
https://www.google.com/maps?ll=40.060214,-74.136912&spn=0.000008,0.006539&t=m&z=18&layer=c&cbll=40.060086,-74.136916&panoid=4hLlHtrejgKyNcmMf0mGSg&cbp=12,64.74,,0,-1.62 (https://www.google.com/maps?ll=40.060214,-74.136912&spn=0.000008,0.006539&t=m&z=18&layer=c&cbll=40.060086,-74.136916&panoid=4hLlHtrejgKyNcmMf0mGSg&cbp=12,64.74,,0,-1.62)
Both are now "Shut Up and Eat!"
I guess they weren't friendly enough.
From the new name, it sounds like they were too Friendly.
The novelist Nicholson Baker was on a crusade a dozen years ago concerning the poor job done in preserving microfilmed newspapers, which in many cases were illegible or edited to remove advertisements that were themselves a valuable source of information. I would not put it past today's hyperlawyered corporations to include clauses forbidding their ads to be so retained, given how marketing so depends on the complete control of the public's current perceptions.