Fourth Street entrance, and many departments were discontinued including Appliances, Books, Draperies, the Home Planning Center, Paints, Records, and Toys. The Service Building was closed with the surviving workrooms incorporated into the newly-vacant downtown store space or outsourced. The Camargo Room service was modified from a quick-service set menu to full service, with a self-service Soup & Salad Bar opened in the adjacent former Customer Lounge for those in a hurry. Full menu service was also added to the Ice Cream Bridge, renamed the Bridge Restaurant. The final Pogue's branch store would open in 1976, a modest 112,000 square foot location in Florence Mall, the chain's only venture into Kentucky and the only one without a furniture department or restaurant. As ADG continued to attempt to update its Pogue's unit in the late 1970s, Tri-County's Ice Cream Parlor would be moved into the store and reformatted to the Le Petite Café format which had proven so successful in the Downtown store. As the 1970s drew to a close, the Pogue's chain seemed destined for success with premier locations in the city's five top retail markets, most notably in a revitalized downtown Cincinnati. But a harbinger of the difficult decade ahead was in 1978 when the Mabley & Carew stores, a rival of Pogue's dating to 1877, were purchased by Dayton-based Elder-Beerman and converted to their nameplate. Twenty years later, a Cincinnati retail landscape that had lasted a century would have vanished. Merger and Closure As the Ohio Valley suffered in the recession of the early 1980s, Pogue's profits declined. The downtown store, in particular, had seen immediate sales declines since 1983 when a city-subsidized Saks Fifth Avenue opened directly across Race Street. Saks' demands that Pogue's reduce their Race Street loading docks dramatically hurt the viability of the downtown store which had served as the receiving and distribution center for all five stores. A new standalone facility in northern Kentucky added to the expenses of the H.& S. Pogue Company division, and in 1983 Pogue's was merged into their Indianapolis ADG sister division L.S. Ayres & Company in a successful effort to keep both divisions profitable. ADG's annual report to its shareholders would note that the first full year of the merger saw sales increase 22%, and profits nearly 50%, at the five Cincinnati-area stores, with market share being moved from all three major competitors (by then Elder-Beerman, McAlpin’s, and