A&P in The Big Easy!

If any grocery store could lay claim to the term “landmark”, the one pictured above would certainly qualify. It’s the legendary A&P at the corner of Royal and St. Peter streets in the “Vieux Carré” (known to most of us as the French Quarter) section of New Orleans. Untold numbers of shoppers – locals and tourists alike – have filed past that red marble corner column through the decades.

The store opened on December 20, 1930, and remained open as an A&P for a remarkable 77 years thereafter, until the company sold off its 21-store New Orleans operation in September 2007. Happily, it continues on as a grocery store, part of the locally-owned Rouse’s chain.

It’s almost beside the point to discuss the store’s architecture. From the start, it has blended in seamlessly with the other French Creole-styled buildings (and their intricate balcony ironwork) that predominate the French Quarter. This photograph was taken around 1970, near the midpoint of the store’s existence as an A&P, and shows a much lighter color scheme than many would remember. More familiar are the darker walls and black-painted ironwork the store has sported in recent years. Its undeniably charming appearance has made the store a very popular artist’s motif.

Recently, a commenter on this site likened the Royal St. A&P to a convenience store, and I agree with that description. Because of the store’s urban location and small size, it filled a different role than the typical late-20th century A&P supermarket. Indeed, whenever A&P ran a larger promotion or giveaway in the New Orleans market, they frequently included the disclaimer “all stores except 701 Royal St.”, presumably due to a combination of the lack of space and the higher selling prices attainable in that vibrant tourist district.

Below is a full page Times-Picayune ad from the Royal St. store’s opening day, which merited a fairly cursory mention in the lower left corner of the page. Also of note is A&P’s defense of its area bread pricing, an early skirmish in A&P’s long conflict with the antitrust regulators. Oh, and 8 foot tall Christmas trees for 89 cents!

One last item - since we’re on the subject of A&P in New Orleans, here’s another area store of more modern design, shown shortly after its opening in another A&P publicity shot, from 1968. Featuring a nice contemporary look, this store was highlighted in the 1970 A&P Study by Progressive Grocer magazine.

Note: Thanks to Scott for pointing out an error and supplying some additional information regarding the location of the store pictured below. This store is actually in New Orleans' Garden District, not the French Quarter as previously stated, and still stands at 3233 Magazine Street. The store is now a Breaux Mart, another locally owned chain. Rouse's, who bought most of A&P's area stores, passed on this one owing to its small size.

C'est tout!

Putting the "Pacific" in "A&P"

On May 2, 1930, A&P opened nine stores in the greater Los Angeles area, their first units on the West Coast. Seventy years after the company’s founding, the famous name – The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company – became a statement of fact, and of the long-awaited realization of a dream.

An article in the previous day’s Los Angeles Times quoted A&P president John Hartford, who had traveled across the continent for the landmark occasion: “These nine stores represent only an opening wedge…of an expansion program which will take in the entire Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain territory.” He mentioned that leases for thirty additional Los Angeles-area stores had already been signed. The original nine store locations were as follows: 6811 South Western Avenue, L.A., 5859 Franklin Avenue, L.A., 31 Pier Avenue, Hermosa Beach, 37 North Fair Oaks Avenue, Pasadena, 136 San Fernando Avenue, Burbank, 1515 Mission Street, South Pasadena, 211 East Main Street, Alhambra, 6265 Van Nuys Boulevard, Van Nuys (Usually pronounced as a single word – “vaneyes”. You’re welcome.), and 106 North Pacific Avenue, Redondo Beach.

A year later, the company opened its first stores in the Seattle area. They took things a bit slower here where the pace of store openings was concerned, but over time A&P would develop a respectable presence in the market. It would prove to be the company’s only other significant entry in the Western states.

The designs of the Los Angeles-area stores in particular were very appealing, with some of the finest area examples of Spanish and Art Deco retail architecture rising up under the A&P banner. Many of the early stores featured open fronts in a nod to the region’s ideal climate – no storefront windows or doors (“open front” meant exactly that), allowing plenty of room to extend display bins onto the sidewalk to attract shoppers. After hours, these stores were secured by sliding doors or folding scissor gates like the kind used by indoor mall stores today. Local competitor Vons was a major proponent of the open front design, as was Lucky Stores “up north”, to name just a couple.

Probably the most notable individual store in A&P’s western roster was the Westwood Village “super-store” opened in 1936. The store was designed by renowned California architect Allen Siple, who at that time was under contract to the Janss Investment Corporation, developers of the legendary Westwood Village commercial center that borders the UCLA campus. The exterior design is in the Janss Brothers’ mandated “Mediterranean” style, as were the other 1930’s Westwood landmarks, including the domed Bank of America building, the Fox Westwood Village theatre and the famous Sears store, among many others. Whether the style bore any resemblance to genuine Mediterranean architecture is a matter of somewhat snarky debate even all these years later, but it looked great in my opinion. The most striking feature of the A&P store, and for that matter the other Westwood buildings mentioned, was its tall, spire-like tower, where in this case the red neon-outlined “A&P” lettering was visible for a great distance at night. The store was torn down in the late 60’s to make room for another theatre.

By 1935, only five years after the first stores opened, there were over 100 A&P stores in the L.A. area. As the company gradually shifted its store mix to supermarkets in the late 1930’s, this number began to decline, leaving the company with roughly 50 area stores by 1950. This phenomenon was by no means unique to A&P - nearly all major grocery chains experienced decreased store counts in the 40’s and early 50’s as they replaced two to three small stores at a whack with one (much larger) supermarket. There was one problem in this case, though – the Los Angeles area was positively exploding in population in the postwar era. A massive population shift was underway. People were moving to Southern California in droves from the Eastern and Midwest areas, in quest of the warmer climate and boundless opportunity the area had to offer. As time passed, A&P appeared more and more to be in retrenchment, or at least at a standstill.

To be sure, the area’s supermarket scene was brutally competitive, with a number of locally-based competitors boasting loyal followings – Ralphs, Alpha Beta and Vons among the strongest of these, with Hughes, Market Basket, Boys Market, Fox, Mayfair, Stater Bros., the Fitzsimmons/Roberts/Thriftimart stores and others I’ve surely forgotten to mention commanding their pieces of the pie as well. The competition grew even more intense when two Northern California-based competitors ramped up their “Southland” operations – Safeway, always a factor, but a major push into SoCal beginning in the late 50’s would transform them into a huge player there, and Lucky Stores, Inc., who in 1963 established a large office/distribution complex in Buena Park to support what proved to be very rapid growth.

It was a battle waged on many fronts – price, advertising (especially on television – these were the wild and woolly days of live remote commercials and crazy promotions), store location, and, fortunately for us – architecture. The store designs of Southern California supermarkets – especially from the golden age (I guess I would call the 1930’s Spanish and Art Deco designs the “platinum age”) of the mid-1950’s to the mid 60’s – represent the pinnacle of the form, with a number of stores standing out as prime examples of Mid-Century Modern architecture.

In this one respect, A&P made a bold last stand. At the start of the 1960’s they opened several new stores (mostly replacement units) in major suburban L.A. markets with fresh, contemporary architecture, representing a major departure for the conservative and tradition-bound “Grandma”, as the company was fondly nicknamed. At the same time A&P was beginning to blanket the eastern half of the country with its Centennial stores, their new SoCal units sported gigantic neon signs, ranch-like stonework and bold colors, a fine fit for the area’s unique vibe. There would be no colonial-themed stuff there.

Groceteria has an astounding set of color photos of some of these stores, taken at the time of their grand openings. These photos prove that (architecturally, at least) A&P could definitely cut the mustard. Beyond the excellence of the store designs, two aspects of those photos jump out at me – first, the presence of the Van DeKamp’s windmill signs on the storefronts. Interestingly, A&P promoted the local bakery favorite over their own Jane Parker brand, a major reversal of their normal policy. Secondly, the “Blue Chip Stamps” banners, meaning that A&P opted to join the Blue Chip trading stamp consortium (an intriguing mini-soap opera in itself - hope to discuss it here someday) instead of offering Plaid stamps as they did in other regions. Both decisions appear to have been a nod to local preferences.

The 1960’s would prove to be a very difficult period for A&P – in 1964, the company lost its status as America’s largest retailer to Sears, but that was merely a hint of much deeper problems. There were many reasons behind their dilemma, which I won’t go into detail about now, but chief among them were an inexplicable slowness to open stores in the booming suburbs, and an overemphasis on their own store brands, causing them to lose out on the national brand marketing bonanza (with millions of dollars in network television advertising support that A&P appeared not to care about) of the 1960’s.

The crux of the matter, as far as the West was concerned, was that A&P never seemed to make a real commitment to the area. It was most telling that the company had never even set up a separate western division. There were seven A&P retail divisions in 1960 – New England, Eastern, Atlantic, Southern, Central, Middle Western and Central Western. The Los Angeles and Seattle markets were in the….uh, Eastern division. Along with such sunny-climed areas as the Bronx, Brooklyn, Garden City (Long Island), Newark and Paterson, New Jersey, all monster markets for A&P. Suffice it to say that two small groups of stores, 2800 miles away from home base, would have received precious little attention.

None of this was lost on the competition, and it was obvious that A&P wasn’t exactly striking fear into their hearts. As Robert Magowan, the ever-unflappable chairman of Safeway, told Time magazine in a 1965 article, unflatteringly titled “Weak Tea” - “I doubt that A&P will come West in any force until it shores up some of its weak spots. And then I still doubt it.” The (somewhat more flappable) A&P brass had acknowledged this for a while by then. As far back as 1959, A&P president Ralph Burger told an Associated Press interviewer when asked about expansion in the west – “A&P originated in the east and its development has naturally been limited principally to that section of the country…There are no plans for major expansion in the west at this time”. Six years later, the consequences of that course of action appeared to weigh on then-A&P president Byron Jay, as he told Time – “We may have made a mistake in the West.”

It came to an end for A&P in Los Angeles in December 1968 with the announcement that the company would sell its 31 area stores to the E.F. MacDonald Company. MacDonald was the owner of Plaid Stamps, A&P’s trading stamp of choice in all but the L.A. market, an irony already mentioned above. The previous year, MacDonald became a supermarket operator itself when it purchased 40 Shopping Bag stores from Vons Grocery Company, who was forced to sell them as a condition of an FTC antitrust order. The A&P stores would be rebranded as Shopping Bag stores. In the early 70’s, MacDonald sold the chain to Cleveland-based Fisher Foods, Inc., whereupon they reopened as Fazio’s units, as previously discussed here.

In 1974, A&P sold off its Seattle area stores, which Retired A&P Executive/Biographer William Walsh had termed a “more successful operation” in his fascinating book The Rise and Decline of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Some of the stores went to Smith’s Food King, which was later acquired by Fred Meyer and then by Kroger.

Anyone vaguely familiar with the A&P story is probably well aware that the sun has set on a large part of the A&P Empire in the last few decades. 150 years after its founding, though, the proud name still exists, on more than a few stores. Not many can say that.

The first two photos below are shown here by permission of the USC Libraries Special Collections, California Historical Society Collection. The first shows a magnificent streamlined/deco A&P and Thrifty Drug combination, located at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue circa late 1930’s. Next, from around the same time, is a very different but equally nice Spanish style A&P, location unknown. Note the men in tuxedos stationed in front. Both appear to be “open front” type stores. The next five photos are from Chain Store Age, circa 1937, and show the Westwood Village store (corner of Gayley and Broxton), exterior and interior views of the A&P “Food Palace” at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Cochran Avenue, and similar views of the South Pasadena A&P store. After that is a brief hat tip to the Seattle area, with a 1959 A&P publicity photo showing the Bremerton, Washington store. The metal sign to the far left is a variety I’ve only seen on Seattle area A&P stores. Last, from the Los Angeles Public Library, is the Pasadena store, located at East Foothill and Rosemead Boulevards, as final preparations were underway for its April 1959 grand opening.

Below are two full-page ads from that grand, glorious era when new supermarkets rated an entire newspaper section (in the Los Angeles Times, no less!). The first is from the 1935 opening of the Wilshire Blvd. “Food Palace”, the second from 1950, marking new stores in Santa Monica, Escondido and Altadena. The ad provides a comprehensive listing of Southern California A&P stores as of that date.

The Last of the Melting Snow - A&P '67

At last - the snow is all but melted, save for a few somewhat dingy looking piles here and there.

Oh, I don’t mean today, when half the country has been covered with record snows. That could go on for weeks yet! I’m referring to the scene above, a 1967 snapshot photo (thanks to Mark) of the A&P supermarket in tiny Millerton, New York. Millerton is some 60 miles northwest of Hartford, very close to the point where New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts intersect. They definitely see their share of snow – over five feet a year on average.

The store pictured is an excellent example of a “Retrofit Centennial” – where A&P would take an existing store (usually featuring the traditional round A&P logo, bracketed by tapered rays or the phrase “Super Market”) and construct a new upper facade of siding, a bit of ornamental fencing and its distinctive colonial-style lettering, providing even their humblest stores with a more upscale appearance. Perhaps they lacked the dramatic impact of the company’s new-from-the-ground-up Centennial units, but no doubt most communities considered the new look a major improvement. Throughout the heyday of the 1960’s, A&P rolled out these upgrades on hundreds of stores.

Endeavoring to finish up these A&P posts before the snow finally does melt…

Being a Primer on A&P Centennials.

Anniversaries were always very important to the A&P. Every year for much of the 20th century, the company’s stores held a special anniversary sale, proclaimed with banners in the stores and trumpeted in newspaper ads. “Come celebrate A&P’s 87th Anniversary” – that sort of thing. Five year anniversaries were an even bigger deal. Ten year anniversaries – huge. Twenty-five or Fifty years, forget about it. Gigantic. But when A&P’s 100th anniversary rolled around in 1959, they really blew it out of the box.

Not content to just hang banners and place six-page newspaper spreads for this momentous event, A&P opted instead to construct a series of monuments to celebrate the company’s centennial. These “monuments”, of course, were stores, and the “series” went on for more than a decade, tallying hundreds of stores. And interestingly, a great number of these still stand, as home to all manner of retail establishments, community centers, churches, and just about anything else imaginable. A handful even continue to house A&P stores.

The celebration was kicked off in January 1959, but a few Centennial stores had already been opened by then. The Centennial store made its "official" debut in mid-March at New York’s International Flower Show, where a special A&P 100th Anniversary exhibit was...uh, exhibited. An 18-foot tall, four-tiered cake was the centerpiece of the exhibit, surrounded by a Victorian garden. A mock-up of the original A&P store on New York’s Vesey Street was on display, along with dioramas depicting A&P’s Jane Parker bakery and Eight O’Clock coffee operations. The last display featured the Centennial prototype, a colonial architectural design that A&P would soon begin rolling out all over, and of which they were justifiably proud.

The design, which A&P generally referred to as “Early American” in its promotion, was based on the architecture of 18th century Virginia. This style was most prominently exemplified in modern times by Colonial Williamsburg, the historic section of the one-time capital of colonial Virginia, which was restored to its original appearance in the 1930’s. One of America’s most popular tourist destinations, Williamsburg has done much to foster a love for colonial architecture among many Americans in the decades since the restoration.

By the late 1950’s, A&P had settled into a fairly plain style of architecture for the majority of its stores, with nothing that really stood apart from those of other grocery or variety chains. They had the typical rectangular, boxy appearance of the day, with brick or tile veneer and a row of large picture windows across the facade. There were the occasional pylons, but for the most part the only distinguishing features were the famous round “A&P” signs, which usually were either internally lit Plexiglas or neon, with beveled “rays” jutting out to the right and left of the round sign. It was obvious to anyone that the Centennial design represented a substantial increase in prestige over what had gone before.

And A&P knew this full well. In reading a number of late 50’s/early 60’s newspaper articles on various Centennial store openings, the same phrase continues to pop up, nearly verbatim, from the pen of the local A&P vice president – “We are certainly proud to dedicate to the _______ community a modern Super Market to serve the people of this area; and we are doubly happy that the new store could be the company’s latest approved design, this handsome ‘Early American’ style”. The key is in the last part of that sentence – A&P wisely promoted the prestige and “scarcity” factors as a way of making sure that customers were aware of their good fortune. They ate it up, as evidenced by the hundreds of Centennials that would be built over the ensuing decade, although A&P did continue to build the standard non-Centennial style in selected markets (along with some unique designs for their Southern California stores, but that’s a story for another time) for various reasons.

In the first years of the Centennials, an effort was made to carry on the Early American theme inside the stores as well, with pediment-style departmental signs and colonial murals on the walls. This was discontinued a few years later, as competition heated up and a more modern interior look, with bolder colors, was virtually forced upon them.

Also in earlier years, not surprisingly, the “colonial” theme lent itself to all kinds of patriotic-themed promotions, from grand opening ads proclaiming “Here ye, Here ye”, to giveaway copies of the Declaration of Independence on “genuine aged parchment”. (I had one, not from A&P, that I thought was extremely cool.)

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of the Centennial program was the way A&P adapted the design for an incredibly wide range of store types, both for new stores and for retrofits of existing stores. The popularity of the Centennial design and resulting public demand prompted A&P to remodel scores of existing stores with the colonial theme, with results ranging from the attractive, to the slightly odd, to the funny but endearing.

The only Centennial store that I recall shopping at personally was in Glenview, Illinois, a near north suburb of Chicago, where we moved in 1970 when I was in second grade, and I have to admit that the store’s design made a striking impression on me even then. I don’t remember much about the inside of the store, save for all the slush that had been tracked in by shoppers during those snowy Chicago winter days. And the Jane Parker fake Oreos, which my little brother and I used to crush up in our ice cream, creating what I believe was the first Cookies and Cream ever invented. To my knowledge, that is…

From the top, the photos depict: (1) An unknown location from 1962, with a lovely red logo, (2) Edmonds (Seattle Area) Washington, from 1968, (3) Columbus, Indiana, also 1968, where the colonial design fit the larger store extremely well in my opinion, (4,5,6) Three views from the West Hempstead, Long Island, NY store, 1968, (7) Somewhere in Queens, NY, 1966, (8) Jackson Heights, Queens, NY, 1966 (Ok, now the “Car 54, Where Are You?” theme is running though my head. No, I wasn’t born yet when that show first ran.), (9) An unknown location from 1970 – someone who remembers “Hoeffer Drug”, please help us out!, Note: Thanks to Bill, who informs us: "The A&P by Hoeffer Drug was at West Boulevard and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, OH. The building was torn down and replaced with a CVS drugstore a few years ago." (10) Southampton, Long Island, NY, 1972, with a really sharp-looking treatment of the side of the store. Below, a mother and daughter show their affinity for A&P brands in a circa 1960 scene, where the colonial pediment signs are visible on the wall above. All are A&P publicity photos with the exception of the "Hoeffer Drug" photo, which is from Progressive Grocer's A&P Study, and the Queens, NY night shot, which is from a Crouse-Hinds Lighting ad.

Lastly, some newspaper ads from the early years of the Centennial era - 1959 ads from Annapolis, Maryland and Logansport, Indiana. Next is an article with an artist’s rendering of a forthcoming A&P store that appeared in the Sandusky (Ohio) Register in 1959, followed by a grand opening ad for the store from the following year. Following that are 1959 and 1962 Grand Opening ads from New Castle, Pennsylvania and Valparaiso, Indiana, respectively. Last is a 1964 article from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, showing off their newly Centennialized (remodeled) A&P store.

Wow, getting real close to December 25, and I haven’t started my Christmas blogging! We’ll shift gears for the next few posts. Hope your week isn’t too hectic!

Hear Ye, Hear Ye, it's A&P!

Okay, I'm sure that some of you who've been following our series on A&P have been thinking "Good grief, what's with all this black and white 1930's and 40's stuff? Where are the Centennials?" Well, my friends, not to worry! Your long national nightmare is almost over.

For those who may not be familiar with the term "Centennial" as it applies to A&P, it refers to the colonial-styled stores that A&P first introduced in 1958 to commemorate its 100th anniversary the following year. The style was such a hit that A&P used it with great frequency over the following decade.

We'll start with the earliest Centennial photo I have, which is in fact the earliest one that I'm aware of, an A&P publicity shot. A nice use of soft focus, taken on a beautiful fall day in 1958. The cars in the parking lot all appear to be a couple of years old, with tailfins more subdued than those on the rocket rides that were rolling out of Detroit that year.

A&P Goes to War!

Probably not the war you’re thinking of, although World War II fits in at roughly this point in the timeline. No, this was a war of A&P’s own – one that started earlier and ended much later.

As far back as the mid-1920’s, there were grumblings about the growing power of “the chain stores”. Most of this concern, understandably, was on the part of independent grocers, who by the mid-1930’s were looking at a full third of their potential market going to one competitor – A&P. Predictably, it wasn’t long before politicians on a variety of levels took notice. As a result, throughout the 1930’s, over half of the individual states passed laws regulating the operation and expansion of chains, and in nearly all cases a “chain store tax” was levied for good measure. By necessity, A&P took these as they came, complying quietly in nearly all cases.

As far as A&P’s business was concerned, they had weathered the Depression far better than most companies. Their aggressive pricing policies accounted for one reason, but another key factor was George L. Hartford’s insistence on short-term leases for all A&P stores. Very short term, in fact – the typical A&P store lease was for one year with nine one-year renewal options. In later decades this policy would come back to bite A&P in a big way, costing them many prime early shopping center locations, but the flexibility it gave the company to close or relocate unprofitable stores was an asset in the darkest days of the 1930’s.

Another development was the conversion to supermarkets. Faced with upstart competition from the likes of Michael Cullen, a former A&P employee who had started a chain of giant, self-service food stores called “King Kullen”, and others, it became evident to John Hartford that A&P would have to jump into the fray in order to remain competitive in their key New York/New Jersey markets and elsewhere. After considerable egging on by his brother, George Hartford, the conservative one who controlled the purse strings, agreed to a 100-store experiment with the newfangled supermarkets in 1936. Success soon caused the experimental number to be upped to 300. Before long, the “experimental” designation was dropped altogether, and supermarkets became the way forward for A&P.

In early 1938, according to the 1970 Progressive Grocer A&P Study, while supermarkets constituted just 5 percent of their store base at that point, they were contributing 23 percent of sales and nearly half of the company’s profits. As author William I. Walsh points out in his history of the company, “The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company”, although A&P didn’t come up with the supermarket idea, the fact that the company opened the first supermarkets to be seen in many locales often led people to credit A&P with the concept.

Further adding to the excitement, A&P decided to enter the publishing business. For some years the company regularly issued an illustrated giveaway recipe booklet, called simply “Menus”, but would now introduce a full-fledged women’s magazine, to be entitled Woman’s Day. The decision was spurred on in part by the success of another magazine, The Family Circle, which was then reaching nearly 1.5 million households through five major grocery chains, according to an October 1937 Time article. A&P’s new magazine would carry “menus and home hints”, but “no fiction or film gossip as does Family Circle”, according to Time. Twenty years later, A&P would sell the magazine off to an independent publisher, who made it available to all grocery outlets and other retailers. Of course, Woman’s Day and Family Circle remain staples of supermarket checkouts everywhere, alongside some distinguished longtime competitors and some shall we say “less uplifting” publications. (Personally, I miss the “Weekly World News”. You just can’t find solid news reporting anymore!)

On a more somber note, the “anti-chain store movement” was rapidly growing in intensity by the late 1930’s. By this time, the movement had an official face. Congressman Wright Patman, a firebrand who was aptly nicknamed “the fighting Democrat from Texas”, had taken the issue up as his personal crusade, and his sights were set directly on the good old A&P. In 1936, he had won passage of the Robinson-Patman Act, still a cornerstone of U.S. commercial policy today, which essentially prohibits manufacturers from selling the same item at different prices to different entities, in effect leveling the playing field for smaller retailers who are unable to purchase at the volume level of their larger competitors. (I’m massively oversimplifying this, for space reasons. And in the interest of keeping you awake.)

Two years later, Patman introduced a new bill to curb the influence and spread of chain stores, (accurately) nicknamed the “Death Sentence Bill”. The centerpiece of the bill was a national chain store tax of $1,000 per store, but “with a final clincher”, as the Progressive Grocer study put it – “the total tax would be multiplied by the number of states in which the chain operated”, a provision that would have meant utter devastation for A&P. The numbers in A&P’s case would have added up to a half a billion dollar tax for the company for 1937 – 60 percent of total sales and a mere 6,000 percent of profits. Bye, bye Tea Company, along with Safeway, Kroger, Woolworth and host of other household names. Even cooperative organizations such as IGA would have been under threat, according to the study. Fortunately, Patman’s bill never made it out of committee.

It wouldn’t remain quiet for long, however. In the early 1940’s, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division filed two landmark lawsuits against A&P, one in Dallas in 1942 and a second in Danville, Illinois, in 1944. For the second suit, the list of charges filled ten pages, which Progressive Grocer condensed to a page and a half and I’ll further boil down to a few lines (This is “Web 2.0”, right? Whatever the heck that means.) as follows. The main points of the lawsuit alleged:

· That A&P purposely ran stores at a loss to drive out competition.
· That A&P held a “partial monopoly”, because of “illegal” practices in manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing.
· That A&P was able to obtain preferential allowances and discounts in violation of the Robinson-Patman Act.
· That A&P took profits from its manufacturing plants and used them to subsidize its retail stores.
· That A&P’s produce subsidiary, The Atlantic Commission Company, which sold to other chains as well, dominated or controlled markets, overcharging or selling inferior products to competitors.

A&P lost the case and a subsequent appeal, eventually agreeing to pay a $175,000 fine and to dismantle the Atlantic Commission Company. The judge who handled the case still had words of praise for A&P: “To buy, sell and distribute to a substantial portion of 130 million people (the U.S. population at the time) one and three-quarters billion dollars worth of food annually, at a profit of 1.5 cents on each dollar, is an achievement one many be proud of.”

Yet it wasn’t over. In September 1949, less than a year after the previous case finally ended, the Attorney General of the United States filed a new lawsuit – this time calling for no less than the Breakup of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Rumors were floating that the government was proposing a plan to split A&P into seven separate regional companies. (For those of you who are at least my age or maybe a few years younger, this may “ring a bell”. Get it? Ok, I’ll stop.)

A&P had used advertising to a limited extent in their previous struggles to help rally public opinion to their side. Exasperated that they were facing this situation yet again, they declared an all-out P.R. war this time around. In late 1949, a series of full-page newspaper ads were taken out in (according to Time Magazine) some 1,800 papers across the country, laying out A&P’s side of the story in painstaking detail.

By far, the most intriguing of these ads appeared on November 11, 1949, featuring testimonials from several of the company’s competitors, undertaking an impassioned defense of A&P. “Who hollered for Uncle?” “We Agree With A&P” “We Don’t Want the A&P Put Out of Business”, and so on, followed by detailed explanations of their positions. The motivations were wide-ranging –including a genuine respect for A&P as a major food supplier for millions, and concern for their tens of thousands of employees. Several of them started their careers with A&P before striking out on their own, the sentimental ties still evident. And then there were the objections on principle – as a “threat against our system of free enterprise”, a threat to growth aspirations of their own. Or perhaps the objections stemmed from a sense of being exploited, regardless of the potential financial gain for them should A&P go down.

The strategy worked. Before long, letters began pouring into Washington D.C. from hundreds of consumers, upset that the government was threatening to mess with “their A&P”. It soon became evident that a majority of people were convinced that the government’s case against A&P lacked merit. The case slowly faded away, ending in 1953 with a consent decree that called for a handful of wholly inconsequential changes at A&P.

Sadly, the one person who no doubt did the most to help A&P weather these storms passed away before their final legal victory. At age 79, John Hartford was still as active as ever, running A&P along with his brother and sitting on a number of other corporate boards. On September 20, 1951, Hartford collapsed and died moments after attending a Chrysler Corporation board meeting in their famous namesake building in New York City. It would be years before the full magnitude of the loss to A&P, in terms of ingenuity, judgment and fine-tuned empathy for the customer, would be completely realized.

At least now, though, A&P was finally free from all of the legal distractions and could chart its own destiny again.

The photos above are all from Chain Store Age, and from top to bottom, show – an unknown exterior from 1941, the meat counter from the Rockville Centre, Long Island, NY store from 1937, an exterior view from Birmingham, Alabama in 1939, an interior from Pittsburgh in 1937, exterior and interior views from Asbury Park, New Jersey (Or is that Granada I see? No, just Asbury Park.) in 1937, and finally two views of another Birmingham unit from 1939, from the Five Points shopping center, with Scott 5 and 10 next door.

Pictured below are John and George, the brothers Hartford, in contrasting styles of dress and matching Bakelite telephones, as photographed for Life Magazine in 1949. Two of the 1949 ad campaign newspaper pages can be seen in the background. (Thanks to Richard of the great Viewliner Ltd. site for the tip on the Google Life Magazine archives. Some fine stuff there!) Lastly, for your reading pleasure, are the two ads pictured behind the Hartfords. Click to enlarge and read.

The A&P, Living There in Allentown

Two classic American institutions - one at the tail end of its run, and one with a few more miles to go. This photo was taken on April 26, 1953 at the intersection of Hamilton and Second streets in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Five weeks later, streetcar service would end for good in Allentown, as it would in most American cities before the close of the 1950’s. The overhead wires would be torn out, the ancient cobblestones and rails paved over.

Despite their introduction of supermarkets way back in 1936, there were still scores of tiny corner A&P food stores operating in the early 50’s. Even ten years after that, they were a not uncommon sight in many Northeastern cities. But times were changing for many of A&P’s core customer base of middle class families. They’d fought the Second World War. Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore. And in the 50’s and 60’s, large numbers of them were moving to new, suburban areas – all too often shopping at the gleaming new supermarkets of A&P’s competitors.

Looking back from our nostalgic viewpoint today, it’s fascinating to ponder how these little stores co-existed with the neon-emblazoned, pyloned colossi at the other end of the supermarket spectrum. A paradox of the quaint and the cool. I’ll take both.

The photo is the work of Edward S. Miller, one of the most esteemed photographers of 20th century American railroading. Mr. Miller, now in his late eighties, specialized in photographing traction railroads (streetcar systems), and chronicled virtually all the major American city and interurban systems of the 1950’s. A truly outstanding aspect of his work was his ability to capture the surrounding cityscape in the photos. My special thanks to Mr. Miller and to Ed Philbin for helping to arrange contact with him. This photo, along with hundreds of other superb ones, appears in the book “Streetcar Scenes of the 1950’s”, an incredible look at street(car) scenes from all over the country, in color and razor-sharp clarity, with narrative and photo captions by Le Roy O. King. It is one of my most treasured books, one that I’ve owned for years. My sincere thanks also to Bob Yanosey, publisher of Morning Sun Books, for allowing the use of the photo.

Every Pound Custom Ground at A&P

Quick, name for me the one private label brand that through history has been most closely associated with A&P. Ah, “Ann Page Pickled Pigs Feet”, you say? Sorry, I’m afraid that’s not it. (Great guess, though!)

Even though the company started out as solely a merchant of tea, and 150 years after its founding still features the word “tea” in its name, the answer, of course, is coffee - “Eight O’Clock Coffee”, to be specific - a long-standing member of the pantheon of America’s legendary brands. For many people, the smell of fresh ground coffee and the sight of the huge in-store electric coffee grinders and the red and gold bags with the distinctive lettering constitute their fondest memories of A&P - long after they’ve moved away from an A&P, or A&P moved away from them.

Within a few short years after its 1859 founding, the company first introduced coffee. Eventually A&P’s house blend would come to be known as “Eight O’ Clock Breakfast Coffee”. The earliest use of this name that I’ve been able to find is in a small A&P ad that appeared in the May 27, 1888 edition of the Washington Post – “We recommend to all lovers of a cup of good coffee that they use our granulated Eight O’ Clock Breakfast Coffee which we sell at the low price of 25 cents per pound. Don’t fail to try it. For sale at all our stores.” Another line in the ad jumped out at me when I read it – “Coffee ground fresh with the aid of an electric engine.” Even today, the image of a manual hand-cranked coffee grinder is used in Eight O’Clock Coffee advertising, so it’s interesting to note that electric-motor driven grinders were indeed used in those long ago times.

Later on, the word “breakfast”, with its obvious limitations, was dropped from the brand name. In time, a legend formed around the creation of the name - that it was based on the times of day that people (in that era, at least) were most likely to drink coffee – 8 am and 8 pm.

Success was not long in coming, and soon several of A&P’s “tea company” competitors added coffee to their offerings. The book “That Wonderful A&P”, by Edwin Hoyt, cites the example of the Grand Union Tea Company, then known as Jones Brothers Tea Co., who introduced a line of “polished coffee”, in which their coffee beans were literally polished “to a shiny appearance”. Although this improved the taste not a bit, it made for an interesting, if bizarre, advertising angle. Hoyt quotes George Huntington Hartford’s advertising rebuttal on A&P’s behalf: “Positively no polishing matter is used in roasting our coffees. Our coffees are roasted and sold in their natural state, no ingredients whatever being used to make them glossy. BEWARE OF GLOSSY COFFEES!” Tell ‘em, George!

As coffee overtook tea as America’s most popular beverage in the early part of the 20th century, A&P, whose store count exploded in the ‘teens, found itself in a wonderful position to take advantage of the drink’s ever-growing popularity. For decades, Eight O’Clock Coffee would be the country’s largest selling coffee brand.

Having added a number of other coffee blends alongside their flagship Eight O’Clock brand through the years, A&P would eventually narrow their coffee lineup down to three main blends – “Eight O’Clock”, of course, the “mild and mellow” blend, “Red Circle”, the “rich and full-bodied” blend, and “Bokar”, the “vigorous and winey” blend (i.e.: the strong stuff.) In the early decades of the 20th century, each of the three brands had unique packaging.

In 1933, A&P introduced new, coordinated packaging for its three coffee brands. With bold colors – red for Eight O’Clock, yellow for Red Circle and black for Bokar - adorned with a gold band and a strikingly unique font, an American advertising icon was born. I’ve been unable to locate information on the designer A&P used, but would easily put it league with the best work of Raymond Loewy, designer extraordinaire, and the other great packaging designers of that golden era.

In the late 1930’s, Eight O’Clock coffee was hailed as the world’s top selling brand, and domestically, according to a 1935 Los Angeles Times article, A&P had three of the six bestselling brands – Eight O’Clock at number one, of course, with Red Circle ranked fourth and Bokar, sixth. Into the 1950’s, A&P’s share of the market remained strong, described variously as “one out of every six” or “one out of every four” cups of coffee served in the United States. (Today, one out of every six cups is consumed by me, when writing these posts.)

And so it continued for years, until A&P’s slow decline and exit from many of their major U.S. markets. Eight O’Clock’s fortunes were tied to A&P’s, of course, and as A&P began to contract its store footprint, the “number one” coffee crown would eventually pass to General Foods’ Maxwell House brand. (Currently, the largest individual selling coffee brand is Folger’s Classic Roast, with Maxwell House Original at number two, Starbucks at number three and Eight O’Clock Original at number nine, according to a recent CNBC survey. As far as overall sales go, Eight O'Clock is the largest selling bean coffee and the third largest overall brand in sales, according to their website.)

In the late 1970’s, A&P made an effort to shore up sagging profits through better use of its sprawling manufacturing operations. Through its subsidiary Compass Foods, A&P began to market its coffee brands to other chains, particularly in markets where they no longer had stores. In Chicago, for example, from which A&P pulled out in 1982, a cheery Chicago Tribune article proclaimed “Eight O’Clock coffee will stay in Chicago”, and would now be available at Jewel Food Stores.

The most important house brand manufactured by A&P would also be the last one they would hang onto. In 2003, A&P sold the Eight O’Clock brand to Gryphon, a San Francisco-based group of investors. In 2006, Gryphon sold the company to Tata, an Indian company that specializes in tea and coffee and owns the popular Tetley brand. Organized as “The Eight O’Clock Coffee Company” division, they have been very aggressive in marketing the famous old brand, adding several varieties and promoting it in new arenas – gas station convenience stores, for instance.
So, Eight O’Clock coffee might be as close as your nearest gas station! May have to drive a bit farther for those Jane Parker donuts, though…

The non-polished, yet glossy photos above depict various A&P coffee departments from the 1940’s and early 50’s. First is a 85th anniversary window display from Portland, Maine, followed by an iced coffee window display from Albany, New York. Next are two coffee department shots from Poughkeepsie, New York. The last shot is a bit more recent, from an unknown location, showing a common practice at the time - the placement of related magazine ads near the food displays. These local store publicity shots are part of a collection I bought a while back (Featuring, strangely enough, mostly A&P coffee displays. Not that I mind that!). Below are a group of wonderfully colorful A&P coffee ads from the 1930’s and 40’s, most of which are from Woman’s Day magazine, which was founded by A&P in 1942. These ads are from the Gallery of Graphic Design, a magnificent online collection of magazine advertising that is an absolute must-see. In that pre-television era, magazine ads were arguably the most important single vehicle for advertising to the mass market. The standard of artistry in these ads is high, to put it mildly.

Appropriately enough, the last ad, from 1938, has a Thanksgiving theme. An interesting year this has been, 2009. Great in some ways, difficult in others. I’m thankful for many things, though, and high on the list are those of you who read, enjoy and comment on this site. I hope yours is a wonderful one!