Wards Strikes Up the Band

The weather couldn’t have been better on this sunny, sparkling Southern California afternoon. Excitement was in the air as the crowds gathered in. A speakers’ platform was in place, replete with the American flag and a group of men in suits, ties, carnations and broad smiles, beginning to take their seats near the dais. Soon the customary civic welcomes and corporate pledges would take place. And there would be special entertainment that day - the Disneyland Band was there! The whole unit, looking sharp in their bright orange uniforms, on a rare five-mile trek outside the gates of the Happiest Place on Earth. The real star of the show was the brand new Montgomery Ward store behind the stage – sporting a smart, modern look with a textured façade, three-toned sign and zig-zag awning. For a few hours that afternoon, it had to be the happiest store on earth. The date was August 11, 1960, and the place was the Honer Plaza Shopping Center, located at the corner of 17th and Bristol, in Santa Ana, California.

The opening of this store marked the five-year point of a complete reinvention of Wards’ image, which began with the forced resignation of longtime company chairman Sewell Avery. Cash-rich but moribund from a retail standpoint in 1955, the company’s leadership change became evident to the buying public two years later when Wards, whose store base had long consisted of aging urban and rural downtown units, began to open large, modern stores in the country’s storied suburban shopping centers.

Driving this expansion was Montgomery Ward chairman John Andrew Barr, who took the company reins after Avery’s ouster. Barr, a 20-plus year Wards veteran, came up through the ranks of the company’s legal department and was a rare individual in that he was neither fired nor driven away by Avery’s dictatorial manner, in a company notorious for massive turnover of upper management ranks. Author Booton Herndon, in his lively book “Satisfaction Guaranteed”, a 1972 history (and then-current portrait) of Wards, notes that company executives in the bad years seemed to profess a certain pride in the dubious honor that Wards had “trained” many of their competitors’ top people.

By any measure, Wards’ new store program was ambitious – according to a November 1960 Fortune magazine article, five new stores were opened in 1958, twelve more in 1959 and twenty-one more in 1960, mostly large, shopping center-based units. The article also sheds light on Wards’ store location strategy, which centered on locating stores in clusters within a specific market area, in order to be able to service the stores from centrally-located distribution centers (with the important additional benefit of maximizing the effectiveness of TV and newspaper advertising).

The market areas cited in the Fortune article were: “Detroit, Kansas City, San Francisco, San Diego, Phoenix, St.Petersburg-Tampa, Houston (and) Dallas-Fort Worth”. A carefully-selected set of markets that left many regions untouched, to be sure, but fleeing time and limited resources forced Wards to pick their targets carefully. Noticeably missing from this list is Wards’ home market of Chicago, where instead of opening new stores, Barr opted for an acquisition instead – In 1957, Montgomery Ward bought out The Fair, an old-line department store chain with a downtown State Street flagship and three suburban locations. Nonetheless, those fortunate enough to live in one of Wards’ chosen expansion areas were likely thrilled to have the gleaming new stores as a shopping option.

Five years of the “New Wards Era” and nearly three years of new store openings brought things to that August 1960 opening at Honer Plaza, where the light atmosphere became very heavy, for a while at least. The previous night, at a dinner held in Santa Ana for Wards stockholders and other dignitaries, Chairman Barr dropped a bomb. He announced, as Fortune later put it, “that the earnings prospects for the full fiscal year 1960 (to the end of January, 1961) were for a new low in the company’s postwar history”. The herculean effort, the new attitude and image, the beautiful new stores all appeared not to be paying off. (At this point in the evening, I would have said “Allriiiiight, waddaya say we bring the Disneyland Band out here? C’mon, everybody dance!! But that’s just me.)

To his credit, Barr had long realized the need for an infusion of top retail talent into Wards’ decimated ranks. For some odd, unexplained reason, the company’s board of directors had forbidden Barr to look to the one place that matched Wards’ business most closely – Sears, Roebuck and Company. (Although J.C. Penney had already surpassed Wards in sales by 1961, it would be a few more years before their business model fully lined up with Wards’, as Penney yet had no catalog operation and still sold mostly soft goods in their stores. By late 1963, Penney was in the catalog business as well and had also begun to open full line stores, complete with appliance sales and auto centers.) The Honer Plaza news was enough to get the Wards board to drop the needless restriction, though, so to Sears’ executives, current and former, Barr went a-calling.

Amidst all of this, rumors of a merger began to fly. In the fall of 1961, news accounts began to carry the story of a marriage between Montgomery Ward and Interstate Department Stores, Inc. as having all the earmarks of a done deal. Interstate, headed by Sol Cantor, was white-hot at the time - a formerly staid department store operator that was scoring big with newly-acquired discount chains on both coasts – White Front in Southern California and Topps in the East and more recently, Chicago. As quickly as it came about, however, talk of a Wards/Interstate merger fizzled. One reason for this, as Time magazine related after the fact, was that Cantor was miffed at being left out of the selection process of Wards’ new president.

In early November 1961, Barr announced he had chosen Robert E. “Tom” Brooker, a former Sears executive and since 1958, chairman of Whirlpool, the appliance manufacturing giant. Brooker, a one-time protégé (and according to author Herndon, bridge-playing partner) of legendary Sears head General Robert E. Wood, had been Sears’ vice president of manufacturing. This position didn’t even exist at Wards, marking a key difference between the two companies. Sears routinely held large investment stakes in their manufacturing suppliers as a means of implementing changes they desired, or shoring up weak operations. Oftentimes Sears would keep majority ownership of a manufacturer for years on end. (A popular business topic of modern times concerns the power that a certain well-known mass retailer wields over its manufacturing suppliers. In my opinion, Sears’ power back in the day was every bit as great, if not more so.) The Whirlpool Corporation, as it existed at the time, was largely the result of mergers engineered by Brooker from behind his desk at Sears. Montgomery Ward, by comparison, very rarely took an ownership stake in their suppliers.

Beyond Brooker’s years of high-level experience with Sears and his peerless ability to deal with suppliers, he projected an air of exceptional confidence that would prove essential to Wards’ survival. Indeed, immediately upon taking office, Brooker purchased a million dollars’ worth of Montgomery Ward stock, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder. Brooker accepted the Montgomery Ward presidency with the understanding that he would be in charge, and that was the case almost immediately, although initial press reports, including Time magazine’s, characterized the relationship between Brooker and chairman Barr as “on a par”. John Barr would stay on as Montgomery Ward chairman until 1965, when he resigned to take the reins of Northwestern University’s business school. There, Barr made the controversial decision to close down Northwestern’s undergraduate business program in order to focus the school’s resources on their graduate business school, which he also opened to women for the first time in its history. Under Barr’s tenure, the program (now called the Kellogg School of Management) became one of the most prestigious in its category, a distinction it continues to enjoy today.

Tom Brooker, of course, had his hands full keeping Wards on the road to recovery. To aid in the battle, he wooed a number of key people from Sears, none more important that Edward S. Donnell, who ran Sears’ Los Angeles territory, their hottest market area by a wide margin. Donnell, who himself had a reasonable shot at reaching Sears’ "mahogany row" within a few years was convinced by Brooker’s enthusiasm to forsake the ideal climes of SoCal and move to Baltimore to run Wards’ entire East Coast region. Within a couple of years, Donnell moved to Chicago, promoted to the number-two spot in the company. More Sears faces would appear at Montgomery Ward headquarters over the next several years. The aggressive building program would continue, with the sails trimmed back just a bit.

Would things get better for Wards? Yes, they would. But there would be times when they probably wished the Disneyland Band was waiting in the wings.

The pictures are Montgomery Ward publicity photos unless otherwise noted. The first store pictured was located in San Antonio, Texas, at the Wonderland Shopping Center (not to be confused with the Livonia, MI-based mall of the same name), and opened in 1963. Known in recent years as “Crossroads Mall”, it reverted to the Wonderland name earlier this year. Second up the Wards store at Houston’s Northline Shopping Center, which opened in 1960 and predated the mall itself by a couple of years. Third, a 1961 American Olean tile advertising photo which only identifies the store as a “Houston, Texas location”, which I believe to be the free-standing unit that was located across the street from the Palm Center shopping complex. Fourth, from 1962 and again from San Antonio, the new McCreless Shopping Center, complete with Photoshopped cars in the parking lot. (Wait, we‘re talking about 1962, right? I should have said “pasted-up cars” instead.) Fifth, from a 1963 Plexiglas ad, the famous Apache Plaza location, St. Anthony Village (Minneapolis), Minnesota. Lastly, the Honer Plaza location as it appeared on that exciting/exasperating 1960 summer day.

Good, Better, Best...at Wards!

Thought I’d give linear thinking another shot and resume this long-suspended series on the history of Montgomery Ward. We left Wards just prior to 1960, when they were a couple of years into an exciting new building program, opening sharp-looking stores in new shopping centers all over America. This burst of activity followed a disastrous 17-year period in which the company opened not a single new store, causing Wards to utterly miss out on the first decade of the fabled “postwar boom”. In 1941, Wards was a strong number two in the world of non-grocery retail, with sales just slightly trailing Sears. At the end of Wards’ new store drought in 1958, Sears’ sales were four times those of Wards, and the number two crown (the “shopping salutatorian”, if you will) passed to J.C. Penney Company, leaving Wards in a distant third place. But things were changing now, and though the road would prove to be difficult, at least they were back in the game.

This 1963 publicity photo shows a popular marketing device employed by the national full-line department stores (i.e.: Sears, Penneys and Wards) in the 60’s and 70’s – the “Good, Better, Best” approach. More or less self-explanatory, in essence it meant offering the same basic item in three different grades of materials, as a means of appealing to shoppers of all budgets. That year, Wards made it easy by going to color-coded labeling – red for good, blue for better, gold for best. Virtually everything in their stores - from clothing to paint to household items such as rugs and linens – was sold under this label format. The young woman in blue is picking out a shirt, presumably for her husband, or perhaps boyfriend or fiancé. I see she’s holding the gold-labeled “best” version. An excellent choice – I mean, he’s worth it, right?

If he’s not, I’d suggest she shop at a place that doesn’t have “good, better, best” labeling!

A Trip to the Jewel Grand Bazaar

It happened only once, so despite the passage of time it stands out in my memory. It was the night our family broke from the routine. The night we ventured out and tried something new. The night we threw our grocery-shopping inhibitions to the wind. It was The Night of the Jewel Roadtrip.

Sure, we had a Jewel Food Store right in the center of town. It was a late-fifties remodel, complete with the famous Jewel porcelain storefront and a quaint tin-tiled ceiling. We didn’t shop there often, however, because in the next town, some seven minutes away if you took your time, was a much larger, more modern Jewel-Osco food and drug combination store. With its far greater selection, most of our family’s food dollars (save for the occasional trip to Dominick’s) were spent there.

One fall evening, in 1977 to the best of my recollection, the folks told my brothers and I to load up into the car (a powder-blue Ford Torino station wagon – yes, we bought the dream), we were going grocery shopping at a new store near downtown Chicago (?!). To cut short the collective groan, they offered an explanation – this was a special store, different from what we were used to, with unique stuff and more of it. It was a “Super Jewel” or something like that. Suddenly, the prospect of getting out of studying on that school night finally registered – “Sounds really cool, Mom!”

So as night fell we drove, into the city, to the corner of 54th and Pulaski, whereupon we pulled into the fairly full parking lot of a large retail store. The familiar orange Jewel signage sported an unfamiliar name- “Jewel Grand Bazaar”. Wow! And different it was – sort of a combination of quasi-European Market Village (little mini-shops, faux Euro-decor with orange stripes everywhere) and sprawling warehouse (huge quantities of product in open-front wire cages). “Bazaar”, indeed!

Probably the most memorable aspect of that shopping experience (beside the store’s prime selection of Mad Magazine paperbacks, which was worth the long roundtrip in itself) was our first exposure to Jewel’s huge new “generic” product line, which at that time hadn’t been rolled out to the company’s entire store lineup yet. The generics were Jewel’s response to the economic travails of the late 70’s, when inflation seemed to reduce Americans’ purchasing power by the week. It was a “no-frills”, rock-bottom price product line, and it seemed to cover nearly every packaged food category imaginable. The traditional Jewel store brand names – Mary Dunbar, Bluebrook and Cherry Valley (long-standing house brands that were about to be phased out, replaced with a unified “Jewel” brand) , with their bright, colorful labels were tossed aside in favor of an austere look – plain white labels on uncoated paper stock and military style stenciled-look lettering. The only “decorative” element was a bi-colored stripe – black and olive drab. Now every suburban housewife could realize her dream – a pantry full of C-rations! Our family stocked up big time.

On September 27, 1973, the first Jewel Grand Bazaar store opened at 5320 South Pulaski Road in Chicago. At 90,000 square feet, the new store was nearly double the size of the typical Jewel-Osco store. The Grand Bazaar concept, more than two years in the making, “present(ed) new merchandising techniques to shoppers”, with “…wide use of palletized basket presentations in the customer shopping area”, as described in a Chicago Tribune article. As such, Jewel was one of the first major supermarket retailers to introduce the concept of buying in bulk. As mentioned, among the Bazaar’s most notable features were its “shops within the store”, including the Chef’s Kitchen (a name already in use by Jewel) prepared foods section, a bake shop, the “Pier 14” fresh seafood area, and the “Cheese Chalet” (later called the “Country Cheese Shop”), where quarter-ton blocks of Wisconsin Cheddar were routinely wheeled in, to be parceled off in small wedges for delighted customers.

The Grand Bazaars were loosely based on the Hypermarché (Hypermarket) concept, which gained significant popularity in Europe starting in the 1970’s. A typical European Hypermarket was a very big store, 200,000 square feet or more, offering a large selection of general merchandise and a full supermarket lineup, with many heavier-volume items sold in bulk. Influenced by this, Jewel had indeed begun development of a Hypermarket idea of its own at the time, although it never came to fruition. At 90,000 square feet and carrying a more limited selection of general merchandise, the Jewel-Osco Grand Bazaars at least qualified, according to Chicago Tribune business columnist George Lazarus, for the title “hypergrocery”. When you consider that many of the Grand Bazaars were coupled with a (Jewel-owned) Turn-Style discount store, they were at least close to the mark.

One pioneering aspect of the Grand Bazaars was the use of electronic checkstands, utilizing “20 electronic itemizing stations” with “four separate stations for payment”. Electronic cash registers were very much a new thing for Jewel (and anyone else fortunate enough to have them yet) in 1973, and it would be a couple more years before the UPC (Universal Product Code) system was fully in place. There were also “cart-to-car” pickup systems in the Bazaar stores, which was in one sense a holdover from a more service-oriented era. And in response to the growing “consumerist” movement of the day, each Bazaar featured a “Consumer Corner” staffed with its own full-time home economist, ready and willing to provide a sympathetic ear and sound advice. (“Well you know, I’ve had issues with shish kabob since high school…”)

Within six months of opening, the Pulaski Road Grand Bazaar was drawing 30,000 customers weekly and was projected to hit $20 million a year in sales according to Donald Perkins, Jewel’s highly-respected chairman, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune. The store’s Osco Drug unit, Perkins said, was the highest grossing in the Chicago area. The press weighed in favorably as well - Trib columnist George Lazarus pronounced the Grand Bazaars “an enormous success”, and mentioned that “according to sources”, Jewel had plans in place to have 12 to 15 Grand Bazaars operating at some point. Lazarus relayed an exciting finding of Jewel management – “The beautiful part of the Grand Bazaar story is that these stores aren’t taking much, if any, business away from other Jewel and Osco stores.”

Two additional Grand Bazaars opened in the summer of 1974, on 87th Street at the Dan Ryan Expressway and at the intersection of Grand and Kostner Avenues. Within the next few years, other Grand Bazaars would follow – 115th and Halsted, Rockford, Franklin Park and even in Milwaukee, a new Jewel market at the time, where the company wisely featured local favorite Meurer Bakery in place of their standard Bake Shop.

One of the grandest Grand Bazaar openings ended up being one of the last. In February 1977, the seventh Jewel Grand Bazaar opened up as part of the first phase of The Brickyard, a rare in-city mall project that received much laudatory press for that very fact. The rise, fall and hoped-for comeback of The Brickyard is well-documented on this recent Labelscar post.

By the end of the 1970’s, the Grand Bazaar concept seemed to just fade away. After 1978, Jewel’s annual reports are silent on the subject. One can assume that they took away certain lessons from the venture and just moved on – larger food/drug combination stores were the way to go, bulk bins of product, not so much. Several of the stores continued to operate for years with Grand Bazaar signage still in place, including the Franklin Park store where I shopped a number of times in the mid-80’s, but for all intents and purposes they were standard Jewel-Osco stores by then – no bulk bins, no cheese block, no home economist. The Rockford store was converted to a “Magna” no-frills warehouse store. Today, some of the stores live on as Jewel-Oscos, the Franklin Park unit being a nicely renovated example.

When I left the Chicago area in 1987, the “Generics” line was still available, although it had greatly diminished in popularity in those more prosperous times. At some point it was phased out, although a number of deep-discount grocery stores continue to stock plain-jane staple goods today. Though the economy of the last few years could arguably be compared to that of the late 70’s, generic products have not made a comeback in this age of brand power. The major chains have wisely taken the cue, ramping up their store brands’ quality and label-appeal, and everything I’ve read says that strategy is paying off handsomely. Now if they could only bring back those home economists…

The photos above are all 1970’s Jewel publicity shots, and the stylized Grand Bazaar font and “J” logo can be seen in several of them. The first photo, from 1974, shows the brand new Grand Bazaar at 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Photos 2 through 10 are all from the Brickyard Mall location, 1977. The camera and cosmetics department views show the typical interior design scheme of late 70’s/early 80’s Osco Drug stores. The black and white photo, from 1974, shows the Milwaukee location, with the Meurer Bakery featured prominently. Next is a 1975 aerial view of the Grand and Kostner store, with good neighbor Turn-Style to the right. The last two photos, from 1973, feature the very first Jewel Grand Bazaar at 54th and Pulaski, where some smart shoppers have selected giant boxes of Tide, "the washday miracle", a photogenic consumer product if there ever was one. This is the store that my family and I visited on that fateful evening described above.

Below, from 1977, is a close-up view of some of the Jewel Generics product line. You’ll notice that the ladies in the background have adopted “generic” facial expressions, in keeping with the spirit of things.

The Room With The Finast View

Here’s an idyllic view of the model 1957 kitchen. Everything is perfect - the gleaming, modern dishwasher, the sleek metal cabinetry and Formica, the diamond-pattern curtains – right down to the pink Telechron clock on the wall.

The table and counters are laden with the finest Finast foods – proud house brand of First National Stores, the late, great New England (and select other regions) supermarket chain. In later years the stores themselves would be emblazoned with the Finast name.

Now walk over to the sink, throw open the curtains, and lo, there it stands in plain sight – the distinguished edifice from whence these culinary treasures came.

“A mocked-up scene!” you insist.

Well, of course. But we can dream, can’t we?

Ralphs Granada Hills Reloaded, 1965

I think most people would agree that where movies are concerned, sequels are rarely better than the original. Oftentimes they aren’t nearly as good. They tend to do well at the box office, however, because they usually feature well-loved characters and/or tried-and-true themes. Once in a while, though, a sequel will rise above the norm by adding a new, exciting dimension to the familiar.

Perhaps this analogy can be applied to supermarkets. (Read this site enough, you'd think any analogy would, right?) The “original” in this case was a unit of the Ralphs Grocery Company, a major Southern California supermarket chain with 47 stores at the time, that opened in 1959 in Granada Hills, California. The “sequel” was a very significant remodeling of the store six years later. The store was featured on this post a year and a half back, and for our own “sequel” here, we’ve switched to color! (When all else fails.) These photos were taken circa June 1965 for a Progressive Grocer magazine article that appeared the following year.

From a retail history standpoint, it’s hard to envision a more exciting, dynamic time and place than Southern California in the 1960’s. This was the era of the California Dream, as extolled in the movies and pop music of the day, and people responded by moving there in droves, or so it seemed at least. To accommodate the transplanted throngs (to say nothing of the area’s impressive homegrown baby-boom output), new malls and shopping centers were opening at a rapid rate – well outpacing every other major market in the country. Among the hottest of SoCal retail hotspots was the San Fernando Valley, home in 1965 to a brand-spanking new mall, Topanga Plaza, and to the still shiny-and-new Fallbrook Center, along with a host of smaller strip shopping centers.

Continuing to do its part was the Ralphs supermarket in the Valley’s Granada Hills, its funky 60–foot tall sign standing proudly at the corner of Chatsworth and Balboa since the store’s 1959 opening. The sign and the building’s red and white diamond-patterned Arizona rock roof had stood the test of time – a bulwark for those (like the fine readers of this site) who valued good taste. The apple-hued interior, however, was definitely showing its age by this time. A major revamp was in order.

Ralphs’ management realized that a run-of-the-mill redo wouldn’t cut it, as noted in the Progressive Grocer article - “...we were faced with a fiendishly competitive situation (in Granada Hills). On three sides of our unit there, and within a two-block area, are big shopping centers, each with a super market exerting the fullest pressure on the trading area.” It was determined that this particular remodeling would have to be something special. On top of that, Ralphs would use the Granada Hills makeover as an opportunity to address a longstanding problem.

“Surveys show that the woman shopping in the super market is often a woman totally confused”, said Ralphs’ general manager. (Lots of responses to that comment are reeling through my head at this point. I think that’s where they’ll stay.) “Yet the same woman who retraces her steps back and forth across our stores seeking out merchandising owes her confusion not to a lack of wit on her part…” (Uh-oh.) “…but to a lack of logic on ours.” (Whew! Glad you put that in context there, my friend.) “She may feel that vanilla extract might surely be located by going to the flour gondola – how is she to know that it is with spices strung out over one of the freezers – or in a separate spice cabinet of its own on the end of table 14? She has little logic to guide her, only memory, and all stores lay out their dry groceries according to their own ideas – and those ideas are constantly changing.” (Let’s try to stay away from the thin ice there, guy. Ok?)

And so was born the “shop-at-a-glance” concept. In essence, the standard supermarket layout was scrapped in favor of “family groupings” – or “centers”, to use Ralphs’ terminology. The “Breakfast Center”, for example, featured cereals, juices and coffee, three categories of product that are normally found in very different locations. “Like shopping in your own kitchen!”, Ralphs’ ads proclaimed. (Provided one kept the cereals, juices and coffee in the same location.) The traditional perimeter departments – meats, dairy and produce – remained in those locations. The “centers” were identified by large, colorful three or four-sided signs hung above their respective areas. To give customers a clear line of sight around the store, the shelving units, known as “gondolas” in the business, were cut down to a maximum height of 5 feet, which also had the curious effect of reducing inventory capacity by as much as 25% in some departments - not a minor issue.

The store’s “grand reopening” took place over three days in early June 1965, with ads proclaiming the specially-crafted promotional tagline: “America’s First Completely Departmentalized Supermarket!” That claim is debatable, of course – Grand Union, for example, had been experimenting with departmentalized merchandising formulas for a good ten years by then, most notably in their East Paterson, New Jersey flagship store. Perhaps it was the first of its kind on the West Coast, however.

Beyond the new layout itself, a big part of the remodeled Granada Hills store’s appeal was its striking new decor. The colorful, classy new look was the work of Brand-Worth and Associates, a Los Angeles-based firm that specialized in retail interior design. The new and remodeled Ralphs supermarkets of the 1960’s were among the most elegant of the era (Or any previous era, in my opinion. Or any subsequent one.), largely owing to Brand-Worth’s stunning designs and meticulous attention to detail.

For the departmental signs, they developed a set of cartoon drawings to be used as identifiers “without a line of copy, not a word”–the frozen foods section, for example, featured an Eskimo. Interestingly, the colors Brand-Worth used for these signs actually corresponded to the “color wheel” – in sequence! (I love 50’s and 60’s advertising psychology!)The meat, dairy and liquor departments featured colorful, wonderfully stylized cutout signs, again with unmistakable symbols in lieu of text. In this respect, Ralphs was definitely ahead of its time. There was one exception to this – the store directory sign above the checkout area, but even this featured the added twist of color coding.

As appropriate as their company moniker sounded, “Brand-Worth” was actually a conjunction of its owners’ last names, Bill Brand and Freddie Worth, who founded the firm in 1954. Among their clients were The May Co. (the gourmet food sections of May’s Southern California department stores were a precursor to Brand-Worth’s work for Ralphs), and regional department store chains such as Phoenix-based Goldwater’s and Omaha’s Brandeis.

Undoubtedly the new decor was a hit, but history is silent (i.e.: I couldn’t find any more articles) as to whether or not the Granada Hills store’s new departmentalized layout was a success. I’d have to think that in the grand scheme of things, it probably wasn’t. One thing is evident – it didn’t end up starting a trend. The average supermarket of today is laid out pretty much like those of fifty years ago – standard end-of-aisle signs, and nothing but lighting overhead.

Which is to say “totally confusing”, I guess!

The photos are pretty much self-explanatory (just follow the symbols on the overhead signs!), but a couple of things are worth pointing out – in the produce department, note the sombrero-ed Fred Flintstone, star of TV’s first prime-time animated cartoon show, standing guard over the cantaloupes. One would have to have been there in the early and mid-1960’s to appreciate the huge cultural phenomenon the Flintstones were at the time, a fact that has been largely forgotten. In those years they were everywhere, and not only on “kids stuff” - lunch boxes, clothes, a syndicated comic strip and all manner of toys and games – but in commercials (Welch’s Grape Juice, Alka-Seltzer and *gulp* Winston Cigarettes), unusual store appearances (a woman costumed as Wilma Flintstone, handing out promotional brochures at the downtown Chicago Wieboldt’s department store), and occasional references on other popular TV shows of the day. A few months after this photo was taken, “The Flintstones” would begin its sixth and final prime-time season on ABC, later showing up on local TV stations, then cable, and finally on DVD.

Lastly, notice the cartons of cigarettes in the liquor department and near the checkstands. It’s a sharp contrast to today, when cigarettes are almost handled like a controlled substance. At that time they were more or less treated like any other product, except for the age restriction, of course. Well into the 1980’s, individual cigarette packs were routinely displayed at each checkout lane, within easy reach, right next to the Rolaids and Dentyne. In the 60’s and early 70’s, things were even more lax, to the point that in some instances parents, if so inclined, could send their grade-school aged children to the store to buy cigarettes with a note: “Dear (insert name of complicit supermarket) Checkout Lady: Please sell Rocco two packs of Marlboros. Thank you. Signed, Rocco’s Dad”

Thankfully that doesn’t happen anymore. But then, neither does sending one’s kids alone to the supermarket.