Safeway and A&P were both well-established in the Seattle-Tacoma area before the war. In their Tacoma stores, Safeway usually boasts that they've been "Serving Tacoma Since 1930." (I forget where I seen it but I remember seeing a 1927 in some other town, too.) They started by buying existing markets and then got into building their own stores after they had a foothold in the community.Brian Lutz wrote:I haven't really put together the complete history of the chains in this area, but none of the big chains really arrived in this area until after World War 2. I believe Safeway and A&P were the first to arrive after the war, and QFC was actually founded here in 1956, but only had about six stores in 1969.
Here is an example of a larger store built in 1938 by Safeway at Sixth and Proctor in Tacoma. The other (and more common) prewar variety of construction were the "Streamline" stores that went up all over the place from about 1940 to 1942, like this one in the Manette neighborhood of Bremerton.
Piggly Wiggly is another name that seemed to surface in the Puget Sound area during the '30s, but I tend to think it was more of a loose federation of independents like IGA at the time.