Groceteria.com

It's difficult to find information about Better Markets. Loblaw did add a small number of stores. Many chains wanted in on the growth in southern California--Kroger and Market Basket, Fisher Foods (Cleveland) and Shopping Bag, Acme and Alpha Beta, but only Acme was successful. Peter Schmitt was a wh...

Having worked for one of K-Mart's better regional competition, I can tell you that you're missing something big: K-Mart's inexpensive, but often poor quality house brand merchandise, which was a long-term liability. It helped them live through the stagflation era of the 70s and 80s and it was margin...

The original Kroger on Central would have been the Colony store, which was replaced by the former Big Bear nearby at 3918 Monroe. Perhaps they took over the A&P to prevent competition or because they considered it as a location to replace the Big Bear and their Westgate store (this location was ...

The link to the annual reports was interesting---I looked at some older ones mostly to look at where they had been expanding and to see if they featured the one store near where I grew-up (they did, it was an early enclosed mall location. The Lee name came from Husted-Lee, a variety chain in the Gre...

Britt's stores were interchangeable with the "junior department stores" Newberry opened under their own name from the late 50s onward. The Britt's name usually was used where Newberry had no existing identity, although there were oddities like the downtown Birmingham Newberry's--a large st...

Probably just a poorly re-written press release. Kroger's standard store size was 19K sf at this point. 13K sf would have been shopping space, which is how they label it, with the rest being backroom. I'm guessing it doesn't include SuperX. Chains like Jewel and National had 20-25K sf combo stores (...

Kroger had a store in Brunswick that probably dated to the 1950s. The plaza looked like a twin to Willo Plaza in Willoughby, where they also had a store. They currently have no stores N of Mansfield and the retailing center for the area around Brunswick has been the nearby county seat town of Medina...

Looks more like they're West Coast US stores than East Coast---did Canada always have its own designs? Did they ever Centennials?

Looks more like they're West Coast US stores than East Coast---did Canada always have its own designs? Did they ever Centennials?

No chain seems really dominant over much of the history. A&P seems to have had an unusually small footprint compared with other markets, such as Buffalo. Up until the 70s when chains began to systematically exit markets where they were small players, it was not unusual to see chains keep a relat...

The Rockville address is just North of the new town center. There was a long running Giant nearby, a little further North. What looked like an A-frame Acme on Rt 355 also was just North of downtown, but that was demolished ages ago. It was a carpet/rug store (the Pike used to have many of these) in ...

The Rockville location was Magruder's for a long time. Now it seems to be a Chinese restaurant. The Kensington address might be missing a digit. The most obvious candidate for it would be Strosniders (hardware) but I think that was an old Acme and the address is on Connecticut Ave.

Congressional had a lot of turnover in the early-mid 90s and I think the current look came in stages. JC Penney closed there around the same time they closed at Ballston (1994, I think). The center had one of the first suburban Starbucks locations (still there) which was notable for screaming kids a...

My bad on #94. I had it confused with the store in Bethesda. #94 was enlarged rather than rebuilt. It’s always been in the ground floor of one of the Van Ness buildings (huge collection of condo/co-op/ rentals plus office buildings). They expanded into other space but basic elements remained like th...

A few edits. All numbers are pre-Ahold. #3 is a CVS. It was a long running Hechingers that was much loved and hated by people in NW DC. Loved because there were fewer decent sized hardware stores in DC than now. The store had rooftop parking which was part of what people hated. The grade was rather...