Take Me To Goldberg's...

Yesterday I posted a picture of the gap site in Candleriggs, Glasgow, on which a department store called Goldberg's used to sit.
It prompted me to root out a feature I wrote about the demise of the store back in 2002 for a newspaper called Business a.m.
Ironically, it was published in the last-ever Business a.m. on 17 December 2002. This Monday - Friday business-orientated Scottish newspaper lasted for just over two years. Each and everyone of us who worked there would probably agree it was just a little bit ahead of the curve. Too much so for its own good - and it didn't make enough money for its Swedish owners.
London-based City A.M. is pretty much a copy of Business a.m. all packaged up for the social media age.
I had a ball writing features there... we took the view that there was always a human story behind every business venture and it gave the pages a very real and readable energy.
A few weeks after this story was published (and the newspaper had been put to bed for the last time), Mark Goldberg, grandson of store founder, Abraham Goldberg, got in touch.
We met up for a coffee and he told me that his heart had skipped a beat when someone told him there was a big spread about Goldberg's in a newspaper.
He felt the loss of the family business very keenly, he said, but he felt that the piece gave a good account of the reasons behind its demise.