Texas

Bennigan's brought the Irish-American pub theme to the casual-dining boom, with brass-and-stained-glass decor, the Monte Cristo sandwich, and a clubby bar scene that made it a fixture of 1980s and '90s suburbia. Part of the same restaurant empire as Steak and Ale, it overexpanded and struggled as casual dining crowded. In July 2008 its corporate parent filed for bankruptcy and shuttered company-owned Bennigan's overnight, leaving only scattered franchises.

Blockbuster opened its first video-rental store in Dallas in 1985 and rode the VHS and DVD boom to roughly 9,000 stores worldwide at its mid-2000s peak. Friday-night trips to browse the new-release wall — and the dreaded late fee — were a fixture of American life. The chain famously passed on a chance to buy Netflix, and as streaming and mail-order DVDs took over, Blockbuster collapsed into bankruptcy. Corporate stores closed in 2014, leaving a lone franchise in Bend, Oregon as 'the last Blockbuster.'

Builders Square was Kmart's foray into the warehouse home-improvement business, a chain of big-box hardware and building-supply stores meant to compete with the rising Home Depot. Kmart struggled to make the format work and sold it off; Builders Square was merged with Hechinger under a single owner in the late 1990s. The combined company was no match for Home Depot and Lowe's and was liquidated in 1999.

CompUSA was the country's leading computer superstore through the 1990s, with warehouse-sized floors of PCs, software, printers, and peripherals plus an in-store service department, drawing tech shoppers before the web took over. As prices collapsed and online sellers and big-box rivals moved in, CompUSA's model faltered. Most stores closed in 2007, the brand was bought by electronics retailer TigerDirect, and the last CompUSA locations were gone by 2012.

RadioShack began as a Boston supplier for ham-radio hobbyists and, under the Tandy Corporation, grew into a ubiquitous strip-mall fixture for batteries, cables, components, and gadgets. It was an early personal-computer pioneer with the TRS-80 and was famous — and later mocked — for clerks who asked for your name and address at checkout. Battered by big-box and online competition and a confused strategy, the chain filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and again in 2017, shrinking to an online brand and scattered dealers.

Restaurateur Norman Brinker opened the first Steak and Ale in Dallas in 1966, popularizing affordable sit-down steak dinners, a Tudor-tavern atmosphere, and one of America's first all-you-can-eat salad bars. The chain helped define the casual-dining category and trained a generation of restaurant executives. After decades of ownership changes it landed in the troubled Metromedia Restaurant Group, which went bankrupt and closed every Steak and Ale in 2008.