Sawmill Square Mall (Laurel, Mississippi)

A bit of a bummer they didn't light up the neon for the "Cowboy Maloney's" part, but at least its still open.
This is a bit of a bonus post since it's outside of our schedule, but I wanted to properly integrate a post on Sawmill Square Mall onto this website, particularly because that while Corn Dog 7 has long maintained a presence in the mall, they only recently opened a new Corn Dog 7 (the first and only stand-alone store) in June 2025 to the north of the mall. While this is exciting news for Corn Dog 7, it doesn't bode well for the location inside the mall, or the mall itself. Catch up more details on what I wrote for Sawmill Square Mall on Carbon-izer.com after I visited it in July 2024.

Sussan Fine Furniture (Dickinson, Texas)

Sussan following closure. (Street View, c. 2013). With all the news of Walmart's new food establishments--Charleys Cheesesteaks, Mr. Gatti's, Wendy's, sushi bars, and a bunch more I've never heard of I think I've proof of Wal-Mart's oldest branded in-store eatery.

Before we get to that, it started back in 2012 when I came across what I referred to as "brown Wal-Marts" in my youth; the older, original Wal-Mart stores built in the 1970s and 1980s, which slowly disappeared as they were closed or renovated, when I saw Sussan, and was instantly reminded of what Wal-Mart stores, like my own, used to look like (probably with "Discount City" signage on the building).

For a while I believed it had been replaced with another Supercenter in the nearby area but that wasn't the case. The store (Wal-Mart #570) in fact only operated from July 1984 to September 1991. (No wonder. The store appeared to have major access issues.)

In 1992 it became Bud's Discount City, a discount/overstock store owned by Wal-Mart that was killed as a concept a few years later because it was cutting into Wal-Mart's own stores. Sussan Fine Furniture moved in around 1997 (moving from Texas City) with almost no updates to the store's exterior.

Sussan ended up lasting longer than Wal-Mart's ventures did, closing in 2010, and even after death, signage remained up for a few years afterward. By 2016 it was fully vacant and demolition began in late 2017.

So what was unique about the eatery? In those days, Wal-Mart operated unbranded, in-house eateries but a tax entry shows that for the first year of this Wal-Mart's existence the once-ubiquitous Corn Dog 7 operated in the spot, something that would also show up in Hypermart USA a few years later.