Happy New Year!

The floors are washed and waxed, the checkout lanes fully stocked with paper bags, and the cash registers are loaded with change and crisp new bills. We’re ready to launch a new year of Pleasant Family Shopping, a look at the everyday places that make up a surprising share of our youthful memories, in part because we spent so darn much time at them! I’m referring to the chain stores – the supermarkets and discount stores, and the shopping centers and malls that our parents dragged us to as kids. The places we took so much pride in driving to when we finally got our own license and wheels. The places where many of us held our first jobs, made lifelong friends and even met future spouses.

One doesn’t have to be very old to notice how much these places have changed over the years. If you’re over 25, you’ve already seen a good number of household names come and go, and for those of us over 40, the current retail scene is a universe apart from that of our youth. Over time, as the extent of these changes has sunk in and life has become more complicated in so many ways, it’s amazing how nostalgic many of us have become about them, to the point where our “shopping memories” are seemingly right up there alongside the dream vacations, Disney trips and other highlights we may have experienced in years past.

Fortunately, many of these places were photographed in their prime, and it’s the goal of this website to present them as they were, along with the sometimes surprising, often frustrating, but almost always interesting history behind the great American retail firms from which these stores sprang. Your own memories are an extremely vital part of things here – they truly complete the picture, and I want to express my deepest thanks to those of you who continue to share them with the rest of us through your comments.

The photo above shows the checkout area of a Food Fair supermarket, as depicted in a 1962 ad for Kentile Floors, a long-defunct manufacturer of asbestos tile flooring, strangely memorialized by identical neon signs that still stand in Brooklyn and Chicago. I love the pattern of the tile floor in relation to the checkstands, almost a “starting block and running lane” pattern. (Had food been this closely involved, I might have gone out for track-and-field in high school.) The store’s pastel colors and the style of cash registers lead me to believe that the store may have been a few years old at the time this photo was taken, and that the tile flooring was a new upgrade, although I'm not certain of that. Also, note the one-line marquee on the back wall, a very common feature of 1950’s-era Food Fair stores that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. Ordinarily it would to be used to promote a store special of some type.

Of course, today at least, it would have read “Happy New Year!” The best to you and yours for 2011!

I'll Be Home for Christmas...

...after I stop at the grocery store for the 17th time. Here are a few scenes of supermarket Christmas displays from the early and mid-1960’s, as pictured in Progressive Grocer magazine. The first is from a Stop & Shop store, with a “festive Christmas painting…executed by store personnel” below the store directory and above the meat display case. Had I worked at the store, I would have volunteered for this back in July!

Ah, those fond memories of going to visit Santa Claus at the supermarket. (?!) And they have a (really young looking) Mrs. Claus as well! She definitely has that “I’ll kill you if you take my picture” expression, don’t you think? This scene is from the Food Mart store in Berlin, Connecticut, right next door to the Topps.

All decked out in red dress and pearls (and black gloves. Wow.), a young woman looks over some snowballs for sale at the Hughes Market in Westdale (L.A. area) California. Well, she couldn’t have found any outside, could she?

An addled-looking Santa Claus (am I the only one who finds this disturbing?) looms behind a gift display end cap at an unknown supermarket – must be somewhere in Southern California, given the Manning’s Bakery display in the background. And the chinos.

From the original caption – “A housewife’s dream world of new appliances in this non-food display of high-profit gift suggestions.” Mmm, capital idea there. Except for the fact that waffle irons can really hurt, depending on how hard they’re thrown.

A holiday nut display at a Big Bear supermarket, Columbus, Ohio. A little tweaking of the slogan would have made this one a sure-fire winner – “Yule go nuts for these values!”, eh? Or maybe not.

Baking supplies “in the round” (or “in the octagon”) at an Albers supermarket, also in Columbus. To the right is a display of “Spry”, a now-defunct brand of vegetable shortening that competed with Crisco. From the ‘30’s through the ‘50’s, Spry had a very well-known spokeslady, the menacingly helpful “Aunt Jenny.”

“Colors of Christmas shine brightly in the slanting rays of winter afternoon sun”, in a Colonial store in Durham, North Carolina. I don’t have much to add, other than it’s kind of a nice effect. I do wonder what’s in those stockings, though…mini fruitcakes?

Tobacco gifts for Dad in this Christmas display at an unnamed store. Hav-A-Tampa cigars are at the end of the display. To the left are Camel and Winston cigarettes in little chalet-shaped cartons, below the green cardboard candlesticks. Anyone who, as a kid, gave a carton of cigarettes to your Dad for Christmas, raise your hand. (sigh.) Anyone who tried to convince him to quit smoking years later, raise your hand. I’m glad my Dad did, after a 40-plus year long habit.

Lastly, a colorful if somewhat jumbled scene, complete with white and yellow striped walls and the 1960’s Food Fair “honeycomb” logo. The decorated tree to the left of the photo really puts me in the Christmas spirit. Then again, the red, white and blue cardboard medallions really put me in the 4th of July spirit as well. Heck, let’s just celebrate all the holidays at once!

Food Fair's Philly Trifecta - 1966

On the same day in April 1966, Food Fair opened three stores in greater Philadelphia of this exact prototype, shown first in an artist’s rendering, than in a photo of the real thing (or one of the three real things, I guess). Look at it – an ordinary supermarket, transformed into something pretty special with the addition of the superb, Calder-esque metalwork out front.

Food Fair as a company was in fine shape at the time, coming off a $1.2 billion sales year and a tally of 554 stores (including 54 J.M. Fields department stores) located along the entire Eastern seaboard and as far away as Southern California (the 51 Fox Markets). The honeycomb-style logo was Food Fair’s standard in the 1960’s.

The Fields of Food Fair

As mentioned before, in the later fifties and early sixties, many successful supermarket chains eagerly sought to branch out into non-food discount retail. There were a number of reasons for this, including the desire to leverage a management and merchandising approach that had already proven successful in foods. Another reason was that by this time, many of the larger chains were developing their own shopping centers/real estate and wanted to capitalize on the traffic their supermarkets were generating instead of giving up that benefit to outside firms. A major reason, of course, was the fact that profit margins generally were (and are) considerably higher on general merchandise items than on food.

Salem, Massachusetts-based J.M. Fields was not Food Fair’s first choice for a merger partner. In fact, as early as 1959, Food Fair president Louis Stein expressed a strong interest in acquiring E.J. Korvette, Inc., the white-hot discounter who was in the midst of a meteoric rise to prominence in retail circles and was a darling of Wall Street. Stein could not come to terms with Korvette founder Eugene Ferkauf, so Food Fair tabled the whole idea for several years.

On August 14, 1961, Food Fair closed on its purchase of Enterprise-J.M. Fields, Inc., a chain of 33 discount stores with locations in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina and Florida. Fields was one of many New England-based retail chains that began their existence as “mill stores”, which sold mostly clothes and linens in their early years, later adding other types of goods. The American textile industry, for much of the country’s existence, was concentrated in the New England states. To save labor costs, the industry fled en masse to the Southern states in the 1950’s and 60’s (sadly, it has since fled en masse to Asia). In several cases, the abandoned factories were then converted to giant outlet stores, from which a number of well-known chains grew. The Feldman family transformed their mill operation into what would become the J.M. Fields discount stores. Other chains who started in this fashion were Lechmere, Atlantic Stores, Mammoth Mart (one of the coolest!) and Ann and Hope, among several others.

Over the next decade or so, Fields prospered under Food Fair, opening many new stores in FF-developed shopping centers. The 1970’s ultimately proved to be rough going for Food Fair (whose stores would eventually go by the name Pantry Pride), and the J.M. Fields stores were sold off early in the company’s 1978 bankruptcy. A fun personal reflection (and photo) of shopping at J.M. Fields can be found at this link.

Food Fair's Finest Hours

A fantastic night view of a Food Fair supermarket, circa 1960, when the company cracked the ¾ of a billion dollar mark in sales and had more than 400 stores. To me, this store shines for a number of reasons, including the superb signage and metalwork and the “open ‘til” digital clock. All were hallmarks of Food Fair in the late fifties and sixties (in prior years the stores featured a neon clock face on the famous grooved pylons to inform shoppers of closing time). The pseudo-stained glass above the awning tops it off to great effect.

I don’t know about you, but if my local grocery store looked like this, I’d forget to buy stuff on purpose just so I'd have to make extra shopping trips!

The Food Fair Phenomenon

For much of the 20th century, one of America’s most prominent supermarket chains was Philadelphia-based Food Fair Stores, Inc. A powerhouse in their primary Eastern Seaboard markets - Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, Eastern New York, Northern New Jersey and Baltimore, the Food Fair empire would become a significant market factor in Florida and eventually extend as far away as California.

Known as “Union Premier Food Stores, Inc.” until 1942 (although the stores were called “Food Fair” long before that), the company was founded by brothers Samuel and George Friedland with a single butcher shop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1921, starting a chain that would grow to over 20 grocery stores in their first decade.

Food Fair was one of the earliest chains to follow the “King Kullen” (a New York-based store acclaimed to have been the first supermarket) model, starting with a large, no-frills self-service market in Harrisburg in 1933. By the late thirties the entire chain consisted of exclusively supermarkets - as Time magazine put it, they “dumped all their small stores, plowed every dime into supers”. This approach put Food Fair in excellent competitive position vs. A&P, who were notoriously slow to discard their small store footprints and counter service.

The above photos are circa 1949, showing the exterior of the Collingswood, New Jersey store and a checkout view, location unknown. By this time the company had 113 stores. As a side note, Food Fair had opened its first store in the Florida market in June 1948, and a year and a half later had ten stores in greater Miami.

Acme - Clean, Bright, Sparkling White

A paraphrase based on a Jewel Tea ad, but one that certainly applies here. Like its future stablemate, Acme Markets of the 40’s and early 50’s featured gleaming white porcelain facades. For the most part, the stores displayed the “Acme script” signage shown here, rendering a great iconic look that was used heavily in Acme newspaper ads. Most Acmes, like nearly all grocery stores of the era, ranged between only 5,000 and 10,000 square feet, lending to the quaint appearance. Ironically, these stores could still be spotted occasionally in urban Philadelphia and other areas as late as the early 1970’s, with some examples surviving even later than that.

Acme Markets was the trade name of American Stores Company, which had been in business for 30 years when these photos were taken. At the time, the company founder Samuel Robinson was still on their Board of Directors. In 1947, Acme had 1,921 stores, mostly in Eastern Pennsylvania and portions of the surrounding states. They battled head-to-head with “Grandma”, (the A&P, as fondly referred to by its longtime employees) and fellow Philly-based Food Fair for dominance in the ferociously competitive Philadelphia market, among others. One of the biggest challenges facing Acme (and most of the other major supermarket chains) during the era was the conversion of their stores from counter service to the self-service format. Evidently it was an arduous process, as even five years later, in 1952, only 55% of Acme’s stores were self-service units.

Here are a couple of links to some photos of similar Acme stores – a great 1966 photo featuring a 40's era Acme store at Wyoming and Rising Sun Avenue in Philadelphia, and another shot from 1991 of the Lambertville, NJ Acme in an incredibly good state of preservation. I’m curious to know if that one’s still around.