Fascinating! I hadn't realized before how
late National's entrance into the St. Louis market was...which makes their success and longevity there even more of a surprise. Contrast this with National's disastrous ad-hoc expansion into Michigan during the exact same era.
I found
this 1995 article on St. Louis supermarkets, and it helps fill in a number of details:
* Schnucks' first store was a "confectionery" located at 3968 Labadie Avenue, and it opened in 1939. This location appears in the 1946 column, so it may have been converted to an actual grocery-store format by this time.
* National's aforementioned entrance into St. Louis came by buying out the local Food Center chain in 1953.
* Bettendorf-Rapp was in fact a division of Allied Supermarkets (aka Wrigley)!
That's a company that I can always count on popping up in places I least expect it to. I wonder if they lasted long enough to run the Kmart Food stores in St. Louis? Or did National run those, like they did in Milwaukee?
* It seems that there ought to have been Rapp stores in St. Louis prior to Bettendorf's and Rapp's 1958 merger, but none are listed in the table. Is the '50s data incomplete, or was Rapp a non-St. Louis chain?
* It's fascinating how the stores of just about
every vanquished St. Louis chain ended up in the hands of Schnucks. Bettendorf-Rapp? Sold in 1970 to Schnucks. A&P? Sold most of their stores to National, who sold to Schnucks. Kroger? Auctioned off its stores in 1986, with most going to Schnucks or National (who sold to Schnucks). National? Schnucks. Once the research gets fleshed out more, it'll be revealing to see just
how many of Schnucks' stores started out in the hands as of another retailer.
* I've heard that St. Louis was one of Kroger's oldest expansion markets, so it may be worth checking the directories from 1920 or even 1915 to see just how long ago their history as a chain goes.