"Have A Nice Day" at Wards!

“Like, wow, Montgomery Ward!” read the headline in a March 1970 Business Week article. The article chronicled Wards’ quest for relevance with the coveted 18 to 34 age bracket, and by all appearances they were starting to break through. These efforts encompassed both of Wards’ main lines of business – the legendary catalog and the (now almost exclusively mall-based) stores.

On the catalog side, Wards’ management took a bold step, shoving aside their standard phone book-sized biannual catalog to issue a special 75-page fashion-only edition aimed at the young adult market. The company bypassed their staff copywriters in favor of an outside advertising agency (sparking a minor mutiny that unfortunately reached the press) and photography by Victor Skrebneski, the world famous Chicago-based fashion photographer. The catalog, with pages “crowded with flower-generation youths and pearly-toothed girls facing front and looking ‘now’”, featured the following opening text as quoted by Business Week: “There’s never been a generation like this one before…This generation wants something different out of life. And it’s going to get it.” (Looks like I’m not the only one who likes to begin sentences with “and.”) In Chicago, Wards took the expensive step of introducing the catalog in a 90-minute TV special that would feature “a lot of skin” according to a beaming Skrebneski. The catalog was an unprecedented success, with 50 percent of orders coming in to Wards via direct mail versus the normal 15 percent. “…about half the sales (were) in women’s fashions, predominantly sportswear.”

This was coupled with a hip new approach to store merchandising, perhaps nowhere more so than the “glossy new chrome-and-Day Glo boutique” Wards opened in Sandburg Village, “a multi-stewardessed, young-executived apartment complex on the Near North Side”. (I guess the proper term today would be “multi-flight attendanted.”) Sandburg Village, a set of nine massive, modern high-rise apartment buildings that opened in 1963, had a somewhat controversial origin. A high-profile urban renewal project for which blocks upon blocks of old buildings were leveled (the entire expanse between Clark, LaSalle and Division streets and North Avenue), the goal of Sandburg Village was to stem the flow of middle-class residents to the suburbs. Although many of the buildings demolished to make way for the complex would today be candidates for historic preservation, Sandburg Village is looked back upon as an important factor in the city’s “hoped-for revitalization”, as author J. Linn Allen put it. In the early 70’s Sandburg Village was the epitome of Chicago trendiness, and I can remember my parents taking us to their huge annual outdoor art fair on a couple of occasions. I’d like to think that I looked at the various art pieces and thought “Hmm, I wonder if these are Miró or Braque-inspired?”, though undoubtedly it was more along the lines of “When do we eat?” Veering back on topic, the Sandburg Wards unit, with its hot fashions and “psychedelic light displays” was another success.

The new look was not restricted to a handful of special units, but was soon rolled out nationwide. By 1972 many stores sported the Wards equivalent of rainbows, sunrises and smiley faces. These changes coincided with a new type of store construction that Wards termed the “modular” format. These stores, the first of which opened in Rockford, Illinois in 1970, were built using a special process of prestressed concrete (manufactured by a subsidiary of Wards) that cut the construction time of a typical Wards store in half, according to a November 1970 Business Week article. With somewhat smaller square footage than the huge stores the company had been building, large appliances and other items such as riding lawn mowers were displayed as floor models, with customer purchases shipping out from a centralized warehouse instead of the store. Fifteen “modular” stores were opened in 1970, with plans for 24 more in 1971 and 30 more in 1972. Certainly this was an important development in Montgomery Ward’s race to compete with Sears and JCPenney.

1972 also saw the celebration of Wards’ 100th Anniversary and the kickoff of the “Century 2” advertising campaign, a year-long series of special promotions that met with brutal price competition from Sears and Penneys. As expected, the occasion called for a commemorative book, but in Wards’ case, two books saw the light of day. The first, entitled “1872-1972: A Century of Serving Consumers – The Story of Montgomery Ward”, was a nice bit of puffery, a slim softcover book filled with sepia-toned photographs, “official version” history and an optimistic eye toward the future. The second, far more interesting, book was “Satisfaction Guaranteed: An Unconventional Report to Today's Consumers” by freelance writer Booton Herndon. Over a two-year period, Herndon was given up-close access to Wards’ top executives, but also spent a great deal of time in the trenches with middle managers, store employees and customers. The resulting 300-page book, described by Business Week as “an unabashed defense of mass merchandising at a time when business (was) taking its lumps from consumerists”, was a brutally frank look at the business, the challenges it faced, and the sea change in consumer mentality that characterized the early 70’s. Filled with surprisingly candid revelations and occasional salty language, it proved to be a bit more than Wards executives bargained for, and certainly wasn’t what one would expect from a commissioned book. Entertainingly written, it’s one of my all-time favorites in the field.

“Century 2” got off to a roaring start for Wards, who racked up the strongest sales figures (and a 45% increase in earnings) in their history in 1973. The painful, 15 year-long process of rebuilding the company finally began to pay off. For the first time, every one of the company’s 22 metropolitan districts posted a profit. The smiley faces, rainbows and sunrises took residence in the Montgomery Ward boardroom, however, when the big news rolled in – Wards’ smashing performance as compared to their two main rivals. Wards’ sales for the year were up 22 percent compared to Sears 12 percent, and the all-important Christmas sales figures that year reflected double the sales gain over both Sears and JCPenney. Wards president Ed Donnell tipped his hand in a June 1974 Newsweek article – “…we’re not out to catch Sears or Penney, (but) we will certainly narrow the gap…Our goal is to be held in high esteem by our competitors and our customers.”

At first, the wording of Donnell’s statement (listing “competitors” first) struck me as a bit odd, but in light of one of the article’s other points it makes sense. Montgomery Ward was now in the enviable (and for them, unusual) position of being an attractive prospect for high-profile shopping center projects, even those developed by direct competitors. Only a few years back, they were frequently spurned “because of (their) reputation for cheap goods and stodgy merchandising,” according to Newsweek. Clearly, Wards’ “increased esteem” amongst their competitors was opening new doors of opportunity.

As it turned out, shopping center developers weren’t the only ones attracted by Wards’ recent triumphs. In 1973, Mobil Oil Corporation, America’s third largest oil company (behind Exxon and Texaco) and 7th largest company overall, began to secretly acquire the common stock of Marcor, Montgomery Ward’s parent company. Within months, Mobil had amassed nearly five percent of Marcor’s stock, and were hungry for much more. Sunrises, smiley faces and rainbows weren’t part of their game plan.

These publicity photos are from 1972, that most 70’s-ish of years. (I tend to look back at the 70’s as having three distinct eras – the early 70’s were the “real seventies”, the mid-70’s were the “nondescript but the Bicentennial was cool and comic books were still 25 cents” era, and the late 70’s were “the era that should be renamed the ‘Pre-80’s’”. Glad I could help sort this out for you!)Top to bottom, they feature a typical in-mall store entrance and the sportswear department, “The Chain”, a casual menswear department (reportedly a favorite of Lindsey Buckingham), a hip juniors department entitled “Reflections” (With a sign typeface known to graphic designers as Peignot and to the rest of us as “that Mary Tyler Moore font”.) Next up is “Tiny World” (Are they mannequins or real children? Aaiiiee!!) Then, the canary-yellow “Party Papers” stationery department. (I mean the department decor is canary yellow, not the stationery itself. Well, some of it might have been… but I think you know what I’m trying to say.) After that, a very colorful small appliance area, the obligatory shag carpet headquarters, and the large appliance department, filled with shades of Harvest Gold and Wheat. The outdoor power department is next, from an era when lawn tractors looked like… tractors. After that, a barbecue grill display. I’m not sure that putting a plant on top of a grill is a great idea, unless you’re trying to dry it out. Oh, you’re right, this was the seventies. Lastly, the furniture department, arranged in tasteful living room groupings. But taste is an individual thing, I guess…

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.

Osco Drug - Out of the Past

This late 40’s scene from downtown Rockford, Illinois looks like it could have come straight out of a film noir classic. The photo is part of an intriguing series of night shots taken by Rockford native Bob Anderson, who now resides in Beijing, China.

The store pictured is very typical of Osco Drug stores opened during the first twenty-odd years of the company’s existence. Founded as Pay-Less Drug in Rochester, Minnesota in 1937 by Lorenzo L. Skaggs, scion of one of the Safeway Stores founding families, the company was dubbed Owners Service Company (later shortened to “Osco”) following mergers with a few other small drug chains.

By 1960, Osco had 30 drugstores operating in six Midwestern states – Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota and Iowa. Their success (and favorable geographic locations) had caught the attention of Chicago-based Jewel Tea Company, which was about to embark on a series of diversification moves.

On February 16, 1961 through an exchange of stock, Osco became a wholly owned subsidiary of Jewel Tea. The most obvious advantage that Jewel gained from the merger was the fact that they now had both pharmacy experience and a well-known regional drugstore nameplate in-house, which enabled Jewel to implement its long planned “combination store” strategy, the key to Jewel’s success in the both the sixties and the decades that followed. Jewel was one of the early adopters of the “combination store” format, essentially a supermarket and drugstore under one roof, with or without shared checkstands. Jewel-Osco would prove to be a powerful brand combination, enduring to this day.

Jewel would initially split Osco into two separate operating groups – the first known as the “Main Street” Osco stores, those stores located near the outside limits of the Chicago area (in the downtown areas of such cities as Elgin, Joliet, Waukegan and Rockford, for example), along with downstate cities such as Bloomington. The Main Street group also included all Osco stores outside of Illinois. The second group was known as the “Chicago Osco Drug” group, which of course was made up of the Chicago metropolitan area stores, including those combined with Jewel Food Stores.

Pictured below in a scene of very different character from the first one (but still pretty cool looking) is Rockford’s “new” Osco store in an early 1960’s postcard view. The store had moved some years earlier to a new location directly across the street from the original Osco, the edge of which can be seen to the far right of the photo. Also of interest is the Carson Pirie Scott store, which had replaced the original Block & Kuhl store in that location.

Jewel's Silver Anniversary Style

The artist’s rendering above dates from 1956, and depicts Jewel’s “25th Anniversary Store”, as planned for opening in Chicago the following year. This store featured the new tower design that replaced the masonry pylon as the company’s standard over the next several years. The store’s main sign was made up of individual “stand-up” letters, but rectangular signs were still used as well during this period. Here’s a 1970 color photo showing a late 50’s Jewel with the sign tower (barely) visible.

Twenty-five years on, Jewel could now claim the number one spot in Chicago grocery market share. Apparently, plenty of customers found Jewel “a better place to trade”, as their advertising tagline of the time put it. Jewel began to take its first expansion steps outside the Chicagoland area. In March, 1957, Jewel bought out the Eisner Grocery Company. Eisner was based in Champaign, home of the University of Illinois, and had 42 grocery stores located in Central Illinois and Western Central Indiana. Eisner grew rapidly within a short time under Jewel’s ownership, with the addition of five new stores in the first year. In 1958, Jewel would open up another new market area, with four new stores in greater Peoria. Although these stores went under the Jewel name, they were operated by Eisner. Due in part to the Eisner market area’s distance from Chicago, but mostly to the decentralized management style that was favored by Jewel, Eisner was operated as a stand-alone operation, with its own offices, warehousing and bakery operations in Champaign.

Around the same time, Jewel would venture into two adjoining states for the first time. First they entered Wisconsin, with the 1958 purchase of two stores from Connolly’s Finer Foods in just over the border Kenosha. The first Jewel in nearby Rockford, Illinois (just under the border) was also opened that year. In the following March, Jewel would open its first Michigan store in Benton Harbor, on the other side of Lake Michigan shoreline from Chicago. All of these stores were serviced from the Melrose Park home base.

Jewel's frontiers would expand much further in the early years of the 1960’s.

Just for fun, below is a 1956 view of the new Jewel Food Store in Chicago’s Scottsdale Shopping Center, located at West 79th Street and South Cicero Avenue and opened in November of the previous year. This shopping center (which still exists, though it goes without saying the original tenants have long since departed) was also notable for a unique Goldblatts store with a curved facade.