A friend began a dime store in Mint Hill in the Seventies, but time had passed his business venture by and it was never a great success. American society has always progressed at breakneck speed, tossing aside outmoded but otherwise perfectly good products. In the last 200 years, very little technology has lasted beyond 10 years without either disappearing or being totally remodeled. The speed of change began to increase in the industrial age of the 19th Century. Today that change takes place in five years or less.
Some industries disappear, others change their product lines.
Addressagraph-Multigraph built tough, fast addressing machines. Newspapers used them to place subscriber names and addresses on their papers. It was a step up from the older Wing Mailer, a wonderful handheld machine which placed glue on an individual label and attached it to a newspaper. When computer technology came along, AM got into the typesetting business but never caught up with Compugraphic which was the Macintosh of the Seventies and which itself vaporized when Apple entered the composing business in the mid-Eighties. The irony is that Apple was not designed for newspapers or even advertising agencies, but for newsletter design.