The After Hours - Bradlees/Stop & Shop

One last look at Bradlees and Stop & Shop for now - here’s a night view from 1967 featuring Stop & Shop’s distinctive new logo, one the company would use into the 1980’s. The further refinement of the combo concept is nicely in evidence here. The difference in lighting styles between the discount store and the supermarket sections, described in detail in the article quoted in the previous post, can be clearly seen.

Stop & Shop would continue to grow through the seventies and eighties, and for nearly all of that period it remained under the leadership of the Rabb family. Sidney Rabb passed away in 1985, after leading the company for fifty years. Greatly respected by his peers, the Food Marketing Institute had previously named its highest honor the Sidney R. Rabb award, which is still awarded each year to “honor supermarket industry leaders for outstanding service to the community, consumers, and the industry”. After Rabb’s death, Stop & Shop was led by Rabb’s daughter, Carol Goldberg, who became president and chief operating officer, and her husband Avram Goldberg, who was named board chairman. Both Goldbergs had spent nearly 30 years working for the company by that time. In 1988, the company was America’s ninth largest supermarket chain with 114 Stop & Shops (in New England and upstate New York) and 171 Bradlees stores spread from Maine to North Carolina. Many Bradlees stores had opened in former Two Guys locations after that chain’s demise in 1982. Thirteen DC-area Memco stores were picked up from Lucky Stores, Inc. in 1982. The 18 southernmost Bradlees stores were purchased in 1985 from Jefferson Ward, a 44-store division of Montgomery Ward (which believe it or not was owned at the time by Mobil Oil Corporation) that was based in Miami.

Family control of Stop & Shop would come to an end in early 1988, spurred on by a hostile takeover attempt by the Dart Group, parent of now-defunct retail brands Trak Auto and Crown Books, among others. Dart was led by Herbert Haft and his son Robert, who would later become embroiled in an infamous family feud that lit up the business pages for a couple of years. To thwart the Hafts, Stop & Shop accepted a buyout offer from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a leveraged buyout firm specializing in retail turnaround. KKR would operate Stop & Shop for eight years, streamlining the company (including trimming back Bradlees), taking it public again, and ultimately selling their remaining interest to the current owners, Dutch-owned Royal Ahold group. Ahold has invested heavily in Stop & Shop, reentering and moving into a very strong position in the New York/New Jersey markets, and maintaining rank in its traditional New England trade areas.

Following the KKR buyout, the southern division of Bradlees, some 50-plus stores, was sold to Hechinger, a Washington DC based home center chain, who opened their own stores in some of the locations. The rest of the Bradlees organization was spun off as a separate company in 1992, coinciding with a stock offering of Stop & Shop from KKR around the same time.

While Stop & Shop has prospered, Bradlees, after years of struggling against competition that included Kmart (which in the mid-90’s rode a short-lived mini wave of success with their new Martha Stewart line) and the ever-stronger Wal-Mart, declared bankruptcy. Sadly, the last Bradlees stores ceased operations in early 2001.

Just for fun, below is another photo from Bradlees high-water mark, taken at the same time (1967) as the photo above. Like previous Korvettes and Two Guys photos shown here, the scene is rife with mannequins, something not commonly associated with discount stores today. To me it almost appears creepy, and brings to mind the famous “Twilight Zone” episode (entitled “The After Hours” ) in which a store’s mannequins all come to life after closing time. Yaaah!

Bradlees' Crushing Success

I’ve probably read close to 100 archived store “Grand Opening” articles over the past year in gathering information to research for this site. While generally interesting, the articles almost always tend to fall into one of two distinct categories. The first is the “just the facts” reporting style: “A large crowd was on hand for the opening of the new Safeway yesterday…” The second is the “over the top” style, the kind of article that had to have been fed to the newspaper by the chain’s PR department : “Customers will be able to buy Kroger’s Tenderay beef from these ultra-modern cooler cases. Only Kroger cares enough to provide top-quality aged Tenderay beef…”

In an effort to dig up background info on Bradlees, I came across a great “Grand Opening” article by Edward J. Farrell from the October 30, 1965 issue of the Berkshire Eagle entitled “Bradlees’ Opening Described as Crushing Success” that really stands out from the pack. The chain’s Coltsville (Pittsfield), Massachusetts store had opened the previous week. The article is written with a wit more commonly seen in political or arts commentary, and also highlights some of the fine points that can aptly describe many of the grocery store/discounter combinations that were then coming into popularity. Some lengthy excerpts for your enjoyment:

“Bradlees’ opening in Coltsville Tuesday morning was vaguely reminiscent of the World’s Fair closing earlier this month. Customers jammed into the 85,000 square feet of merchandise. They tugged, they yanked, shoved and they pushed.

It was a smasshing (sp) success. Police had to take up posts at the main entrances and limit the inflow of customers. Company executives were pressed into service at grocery checkout counters “bagging” groceries. The lines waiting to get through the checkout stations choked off all aisles. Most swarmed around bargain counters like football players after a fumbled ball.

Wilted Bradlees executives, easily identified by their wilted carnations, were ecstatic. Pittsfield’s welcome was “tremendous, fabulous and overwhelming.” But there was no joy in other parts of the city. Zayre and the Big N (the long-gone department store division of the long-gone Neisner’s variety chain) played to nearly vacant parking lots. You could cross North Street walking on your hands without danger. Clerks in other grocery stores spent the day dusting off the string beans and bananas.

The only consolation the day offered other merchants was the thought that the novelty would wear off, and everyone could settle down to good, clean competition.

The store was “shopped” thoroughly. Just about every north Street merchant prince was either present or represented by a court member. The parking lot, with space for 1,000 cars, overflowed into the meadow across the road. It was difficult to determine where the shoppers were coming from because all registration plates were from Massachusetts.”

“The Merrill Road store conforms in design to the 34 other Bradlee stores in New England. It has the self-service food counter on the north and the mass merchandising on the south side. It is all under one roof, but the two departments are carefully separated and are operated as individual entities.

The two sections differ in design to a small degree. The grocery, or Stop & Shop area, looks like a supermarket with long rows of fluorescent tubes mounted on the ceiling for light. On the department store side, the lighting is recessed and is much softer.

The distribution of various departments in the department store area conforms to the accepted pattern established some time ago by the pioneers of mass merchandising. The theory is that women go to the right and men go to the left upon entering a store, and they will probably meet somewhere near the hardware department. Bradlee allows for deviations from the pattern by locating bargain counters on a scattered-site basis hoping to snare unsuspecting shoppers with a batch of irresistible buys.

Tuesday’s opening-day crowd conformed pretty much to the accepted, but the more experienced mass merchandise shoppers located the loss-leaders early in the game and walked off with the treasures.

Bradlees has made one important concession to the mass merchandise customer. Many departments are equipped with their own cash registers. This means shoppers can approach the checkout counters equipped to go right through.

The new Bradlees store is no architectural masterpiece. (Dave’s comment: Waat?!) It looks as though it had been mass produced. There is an enormous amount of glass on the front. This is framed by a mixture of tapestry brick and some rust-color field stone. Bright splashes of color are provided by the Bradlee signs.”

“The concept of a Bradlees store – combining grocery and mass merchandising under one roof – was a natural development. It seemed that every time a supermarket opened in a shopping center, a mass merchandising outlet followed. It was only natural and cost-saving, then, to put the two operations under one roof.

With this pioneering venture behind them, Stop & Shop officials looked around for other fields to conquer. They startled the grocery industry two months ago by announcing Stop & Shop would no longer give trading stamps. Instead, the company said it was going to pass on the savings to customers. This announcement has left the female population in a quandary torn between its two greatest loves – trading stamps and a penny saved. Tune in tomorrow to find out if Stella Bella, girl shopper, takes her stamps or takes her pennies.”

Great stuff. And I can’t help but wonder what choice “Stella Bella” made. Maybe there was a follow-up article that I’ve missed.

Oh well. Anyway, the three stores pictured are from 1963-64, and “masterpieces” or not, in my opinion they reflect a nice improvement over the Zayre-like design of the earlier Bradlees stores, such as the one pictured in the previous post. The first photo is of a Bradlees Family Center, a food and general merchandise combo store from Poughkeepsie, New York which opened in 1963. This store was Stop & Shop’s first corporate venture into New York State. The second photo, from 1964 is of a Family Center in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the third photo is of a Bradlees Discount Foods, a stand-alone discount food store, which gave the company a second food store banner besides Stop & Shop. The first of these opened in 1963 in Hingham, MA. I’m not sure of this store’s location.

Big Bargains at Bradlees

At the start of the 1960’s, Stop & Shop was enjoying great success, with over 100 mostly large, modern supermarkets, adding between fifteen and twenty per year. The majority of their new locations were in shopping centers, and increasingly the company served as the prime developer of those centers, leasing space alongside their own stores to popular but less well-capitalized discount store chains, most frequently Zayre or J.M. Fields. The time had come to bring a discount operation of their own into the fold.

In February 1961, Stop & Shop entered the discounting world with the purchase of Bradlees, Inc., a six-store discount store chain founded in 1958 by Isadore Berson, Morris and Edward Kouzon. Thrown into the deal was a seven-store chain of children’s clothing stores called “Youth Centre”, founded in 1937 in Springfield, Massachusetts, also by Mr. Berson. At the time of the acquisition, both chains’ stores were concentrated in the Hartford, CT and Springfield, MA areas. Stop & Shop would dispose of the Youth Centre stores fairly quickly, but the Bradlees chain would prosper and grow under their aegis for many years, becoming one of the best-known retail institutions in the Northeast. The existing Bradlees management was left in place for the first year, and after that time, Stop & Shop opted to go pedal-to-the-metal in expanding the Bradlees operation. New stores were built from the ground up, and acquisitions were made, including the three-store Family Circle chain of New Jersey and the Orbit stores, another three store operation, of Massachusetts. By 1968, there would be nearly 50 Bradlees stores.

The above view is circa 1962, a Stop & Shop-developed shopping center in Northampton, Massachusetts called Kingsgate Plaza. In addition to the Bradlees and Stop & Shop, note the Grants store in between them. At the time the W.T. Grant Company, a venerable old variety chain, was in the midst of a furious (over)expansion nationwide, adding some 100 stores a year. The shopping center still exists and is still owned by Stop & Shop, with a Super Stop & Shop now standing in the former Bradlees location.

Stop & Shop, Bigger & Better

Stop & Shop was as aggressive as any major chain in replacing their small urban grocery stores with larger shopping center-based stores through the late fifties and early sixties. As the photos above show, they carried this out using an interesting variety of architectural designs, with an obvious focus on their large, block-lettered logotype.

They made a number of acquisitions during the period, most notably the Tedeschi chain in 1961, a six-store operation with stores located mostly in southeastern Massachusetts. Unlike Stop & Shop’s other acquisitions, management opted in this case to maintain the Tedeschi name and retain the existing management for those stores. Like a number of other chains, Stop & Stop also recognized the value of locating next to discount stores. Note the adjacent “J.M. Fields” sign in the first photo. Fields would be acquired by fellow supermarket chain Food Fair, in 1961, the same year in which Stop & Shop would themselves buy out the six-store Bradlees chain. By 1962, Stop & Shop was active in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut.

The photos above, top to bottom, show the following locations: Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1958, Hyde Park, MA also from ’58, Medford, MA from 1957, Manchester, Connecticut circa 1960, East Providence, RI from 1962, and Concord, New Hampshire from the same year.

Two Guys Discount Stores '64 edition

The pictures above are exterior views from 1964, when Two Guys was certainly in the top echelon of America’s fastest growing discount department stores. The first two photos are of the chain’s standard 135,000 square foot prototype, the first being the Cherry Hill, New Jersey store in the Camden County Plaza shopping center (as mentioned in the previous post), the second a new store in Dover, New Jersey located on Route 46. The third was a 200,000 square foot monster of a store from Jersey City, N.J., which was located on Route 440 and Communipaw Avenue.

Two Guys/Vornado continued to grow and expand in the late 1960’s and early seventies to around 60 stores in the Eastern states, and they eventually added a number of Two Guys stores in California to augment Vornado’s purchase of the Food Giant/Unimart/Builders Emporium organization there. The peak of Vornado’s retail success, from a sales standpoint at least, came in 1975 when sales reached nearly a billion dollars. The decline was swift from that point, however, due in part to their ill-fated Western expansion, the general economic doldrums of the times and heated competition in their core Eastern markets from companies like Caldor and Kmart, who were extremely formidable at the time. In 1979, Vornado divested the 22 existing West Coast stores, and the following year 12 stores were leased to Montgomery Ward. In 1981, all but twelve of the remaining stores were closed. Then on February 9, 1982, this headline appeared in the New York Times – “Two Guys Chain Ended”. The final twelve stores were leased to Stop and Shop Companies, Inc. to be reopened as Bradlees stores.

Vornado has never looked back, achieving super-success over the last 25 years as a real estate investment trust, owner of a multitude of shopping centers and prestigious downtown office buildings including Chicago’s famous Merchandise Mart, which they purchased from the Kennedy family in the late 1990’s. In an interesting twist, Vornado recently reentered the retail arena, having purchased a 1/3 interest in Toys R Us in 2005.

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