Chain history in Morgantown, WV (or, the case of the missing Kroger)
Posted: 06 Jun 2018 19:17
This week, I belatedly discovered that one of my library cards gives me access to the same Ancestry.com city directory collection that our host uses to fill gaps in his site's coverage. This news probably thrills him (because it means I'll be able to contribute more cities in the future), and it means that I'm able to decipher some of the grocery mysteries in the cities I've lived over the years. There are some places, however, that present more questions than answers.
Take for example Morgantown, West Virginia, the place where I toiled away in the mid-2000s. It's a well-retailed city, with both WV and Pennsylvania influence. One look at the 1960 directory (the most recent year available), however, revealed a surprising dearth of chain grocers: There was one A&P, one Acme, two Thorofares...and that was all. There were no Giant Eagles. There were no Krogers.
I found the lack of Kroger particularly surprising. Both Charleston and Pittsburgh had a Kroger presence back to the 1920s, as did many West Virginia cities of lesser significance than Morgantown. What happened there? Fortunately my library card gives me access to newspapers as well as directories, and they gave me a few precise answers. It turns out that the first Kroger store in Morgantown (seen above from coverage of a 1974 labour strike) didn't open until the late, late date of 11 January 1970! This store was actually in Sabraton, an adjacent town annexed in 1949. It survives intact as the leftmost anchor of this centre, a short distance from its 1980s greenhouse-era replacement. Confusing matters is that there was speculation in 1968 that Kroger would open a store in the Suncrest Shopping Plaza on Patteson Drive...but it never opened as such. When Morgantown's second Kroger store opened in November 1974, it was located across the street from the Plaza without being part of it. This store is still in business today. And Morgantown retained two Kroger stores all the way up to 2008, when a third store opened on the northeast end of town.
This answers what happened...but what about the why? My best informed guess is that Morgantown for many years fell into the "no-man's land" between Kroger's Pittsburgh and Charleston divisions, with neither willing to take the market on. Add that to the weakness of A&P and other chains, and you have the ingredients of a 1960s grocery store scene much more skewed towards independents than usual.
Take for example Morgantown, West Virginia, the place where I toiled away in the mid-2000s. It's a well-retailed city, with both WV and Pennsylvania influence. One look at the 1960 directory (the most recent year available), however, revealed a surprising dearth of chain grocers: There was one A&P, one Acme, two Thorofares...and that was all. There were no Giant Eagles. There were no Krogers.
I found the lack of Kroger particularly surprising. Both Charleston and Pittsburgh had a Kroger presence back to the 1920s, as did many West Virginia cities of lesser significance than Morgantown. What happened there? Fortunately my library card gives me access to newspapers as well as directories, and they gave me a few precise answers. It turns out that the first Kroger store in Morgantown (seen above from coverage of a 1974 labour strike) didn't open until the late, late date of 11 January 1970! This store was actually in Sabraton, an adjacent town annexed in 1949. It survives intact as the leftmost anchor of this centre, a short distance from its 1980s greenhouse-era replacement. Confusing matters is that there was speculation in 1968 that Kroger would open a store in the Suncrest Shopping Plaza on Patteson Drive...but it never opened as such. When Morgantown's second Kroger store opened in November 1974, it was located across the street from the Plaza without being part of it. This store is still in business today. And Morgantown retained two Kroger stores all the way up to 2008, when a third store opened on the northeast end of town.
This answers what happened...but what about the why? My best informed guess is that Morgantown for many years fell into the "no-man's land" between Kroger's Pittsburgh and Charleston divisions, with neither willing to take the market on. Add that to the weakness of A&P and other chains, and you have the ingredients of a 1960s grocery store scene much more skewed towards independents than usual.