It’s the final day for parents to pack up inventory, take down hand-written "SALE: Request a special” posters and close their Springvale store of nearly 35 years.
I wasn’t allowed to open the door because I was still packing, but my mother insisted. We have boxing toasters, air fryers, blenders, speakers, sandwich presses, as well as some of the weirder stuff you won’t find at your average Betta store. Things like a cloth-covered shopping cart, a wooden-handled umbrella ($10 off), and a dozen pink glitter pencil cases that my mother bought to give to her kids during the post-Christmas Kmart sale will hopefully make your parents stick around longer and buy that refrigerator you’ve been eyeing for the past 40 minutes.
“Yeah, she’s trying to buy the last air fryer! Help me quickly enter the receipt.” Because my mother urged my sister, my aunt had to stop taping the Maidia box and enter the customer’s name and address on the invoice. My mother was the best salesperson here, but she can’t read or write English. She invested money into the shop for 10 years, working in a cramped garage when we were growing up, making jewelry and handling hazardous chemicals like potassium cyanide. And for almost 15 years she has been selling the wonders of modern technology from this shophouse on Springvale Road.
I was a child when the store first opened. Springvale, with its underground tunnels across the street, $2 banh mi shops and shops selling majestic emerald, purple and indigo diamond-encrusted regalia, was my vision of what adult life should look like. In between selling white and brown goods to white and brown people, we would have a nice lunch, and in the evening we would all get dressed and go somewhere fun. But the reality is that my parents weren’t going anywhere. The store was our life and that was enough. When I was 16, there was a short-lived McDonald’s, but my dad and I would still go to the chicken rice and pho restaurant for lunch. There was a bubble tea shop, a library where I wrote my first book, and a literal wet market where mangoes were $1 a kilo at the end of the day.
On our last day, we found a Sony Walkman case, a cassette holder, a Nintendo Game Boy cassette (Kirby’s Dream World), and a bag of polar fleece rags that my aunt had sewn 30 years ago and thought the scraps would be useful for wiping dust off hi-fi equipment. A CD player designed to look like a vintage 1920s radio, a device that plugs into the wall and makes a disgusting noise that only mosquitoes and rats can hear, and a battery-operated "facial massager” are on display alongside Philishave razors. really Boxed mermaid Barbie dolls were also used in the 1990s. “I’m saving this for when my grandchildren come to visit.” My mother said as I showed her.
In the world of appliance retailing, if Harvey Norman stores are the sleek best thoroughbreds and the Good Guys are the affable blue heelers, then Betta Electricals and Retravisions are the beloved long-lived dogs. It’s resilient, it’s loved and maintained by the community, it’s a mix of everything.
“It truly is the end of an era.” My friends tell me And before me is a list of the lives of my parents, aunts and uncles. There was a small kitchen upstairs with an iron and a box of popcorn makers, and we would scoff away food if we had guests downstairs. A small window through which the clean-cut South Asian man who used to sleep on a hard dumpster in our parking lot carefully folded his blanket and watched our delivery truck rumble into its spot during the day. A trip my daughter, who was two years old at the time, took with her grandparents every Monday. On days when her grandparents remembered her, they would take her to work on the train, where there was an endless supply of toys and 15 TVs to watch at the same time.
“What are your parents going to do after retirement?” my friends asked.
"retirement?” Mom laughed. “No. Now we all just work in the Footscray store.”
And in the Footscray Betta, Aunty Kieu and David are still going strong. My father, who is in his mid-70s, can still calculate in his head the horsepower needed for each air conditioner depending on the size of the room. Uncle Fang worked into his 80s. Survivors of the Killing Fields and Mao Zedong’s China, denied the wonders of modern medicine, electricity, and white goods – this was not just their existence, but their whole new life, their second chance at redemption.
“Footscray is closer to home.” My mother added. “You’ll spend less time driving and can visit more often.”