If you could bring a defunct store back.....

[klkla]

I think there have been discussions about it on here before but Sage's was a chain that operated in San Bernardino/Riverside Counties in Southern California and was way ahead of it's time in offering one stop shopping. They had great customer service and a great restaurant/bakery. I actually didn't mind being dragged to the grocery store with my mom as a kid as long as we were going to Sage's.

Was that the discount department store operated by Walgreens, or is it a different store?

No. It was a completely different store. I think they only had 6 or 7 stores at their peak but they were a true pioneer of the one-stop shopping concept.

[Ohio Man]

I would bring Liberal back. They had a rather significant presence here in Cincinnati, including a large store near the University of Cincinnati. I'd like to bring them back for a couple of reasons: (1) I never set foot in one, unless it was when I was too young to remember, and (2) Their name--it would drive a lot of the conservative folks in the area crazy. They would write letters to the local paper, organize boycotts, and just be enraged in general. It would be extremely entertaining.

[pseudo3d]

Definitely Schwegmann, as that is not only not later absorbed properly by bigger supermarkets but was also unique in its own right, operating huge 70k+ square feet stores years before everyone else did. In my "Alternate History", they focused on adding a complete line-up of general merchandise in the early 1990s before buying up the Real Superstore from Loblaws, divesting its smaller stores (That Stanley! and Canal Villere) to focus on bigger stores. They greatly benefited from Super Kmart's pullout in 2002, reopening them as stores under that name, and purchasing Auchan in Houston. Today, Schwegmann operates over 150 "superstores" from Arizona to Georgia.