I expected
Lansing, MI to be the last grocery table I posted for a while, but I ended up eating my words. I find this research oddly therapeutic:
Keene, NH chain grocery/supermarket locations, 1925-2018
Why Keene? I've never stepped foot there. But I did it for two reasons...
- To plug a hole in Groceteria's state-by-state coverage.
- Piggly Wiggly is "based" in Keene.
Piggly Wiggly's presence in Keene probably amounts to nothing more than a room with a phone and filing cabinet in it. PW is decentralized, and whatever city name appears on the bottom of their milk labels and bread wrappers is pretty arbitrary and has minimal significance to store operations and distribution. Keene is more accurately home to C&S Wholesale Grocers, which acquired the rights to the Piggly Wiggly
name after it had been bounced around like a hot potato through the 1980s and 1990s. But I'm unclear if even
they supply groceries to Piggly Wiggly stores. At least in the midwest, PW stores have their own franchiser based in Wisconsin and are supplied by Topco.
Does Piggly Wiggly have
stores in Keene? Did Piggly Wiggly
ever have stores in Keene, even in the olden days when they operated in places as far-flung as Canada and San Francisco?
No. Never.
Oh, the irony.
Other quick notes...
- I took the liberty of adding a "2018" column culled from Google Maps to disguise the fact that the next-newest source of information is more than 50 years old.
- Yes, there's a "Marlboro Street" in Keene. No, I don't smoke.
- I'm not sure how closely the Fairbanks stores were connected, especially in later years.
- I'm also not sure why Kazanas Bros. reappeared in the 1955 directory after a 25-year hiatus.
- The first A&P supermarket at 37-39 Roxbury Street still stands:
"The pale pastels which have been featured in most food stores during the past 20 years are no longer in tune with the mood of the 1970s."
Andrew Turnbull