Last Spin of the Turn-Style

The mid/late-1970’s proved to be the Waterloo of a number of discount retail chains with a significant presence in Chicago. The late George Lazarus, longtime business writer for the Chicago Tribune, listed the recent casualties in a 1978 editorial – Topps (Interstate Stores), Korvettes, W.T. Grant and Robert Hall Village. In short order, Jewel-owned Turn-Style would be added to the list.

Turn-Style’s profitable run at the end of the sixties and the dawn of the seventies brought about an acceleration, however mild, of the Family Center program, where the chain grew from a couple of area stores to thirteen by 1976. The last Chicago Turn-Style stores were opened in conjunction with a new Jewel concept – the Jewel Grand Bazaar, a larger (60,000-plus square feet) supermarket format that enjoyed great success in its early years. Loosely based on the European “hypermarkets”, these stores combined the feel of an open air market with huge bulk displays of product. Jewel, widely credited with marketing the country’s first “generic” supermarket product line (in 1977), used the Grand Bazaar stores for its launch. Three Grand Bazaar locations that adjoined some of the final Turn-Style stores were located at 54th Street and Pulaski Road, 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway, and at Grand and Kostner Avenues. In 1974, Turn-Style’s president, Bill Lewis, was reassigned by Jewel to head up a new group, charged with developing a "real" hypermarket for Jewel. It was to include a discount department store, pharmacy and food store under one (very large -200,000 sq. ft.) roof, in what could have been a more upscale precursor to today’s Wal-Mart Supercenters. Sadly, this never materialized.

Turn-Style, which as Lazarus put it, “(had) never been a winner for Jewel” at least held its own into the mid-70’s, but things went downhill quickly from there. In 1975, Turn-Style lost its independent division status and was placed under the Osco group, along with the very successful Osco Drug stores and Jewel’s hapless, soon to be jettisoned Republic Lumber stores.

In 1978, there were 24 Zayre stores and 38 Kmart (who had just snapped up two Korvettes and two Robert Hall Village locations) stores in operation in the greater Chicago area, huge footprints (and a correspondingly huge advertising advantage) in contrast with Turn-Style, which was standing still after all those years with only 13 area units, incomplete market coverage and far less than ideal advertising utilization.

When May Department Stores, Inc., with its growing Venture stores division came calling, Jewel was receptive. On March 7, 1978 it was announced that Jewel would sell 22 Turn-Styles to May for conversion into Venture stores, including locations in Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska. Ten of the 13 Chicago stores were included, with the other three – Harlem-Foster, Niles and Westmont retained by Jewel for eventual conversion to larger Jewel-Osco units. The handful of Boston units went to various tenants, including Zayre.

The top photo, from 1975, shows the 87th and Dan Ryan Expressway Turn-Style/Osco Drug/Jewel Grand Bazaar location. The second photo shows the Quincy, Massachusetts location, originally opened in 1966 and remodeled ten years later, in a photo taken shortly thereafter. The photo gives a nice look at Jewel’s New England family – Star Market, Brigham’s Ice Cream Shop, Osco Drug and Turn-Style. The only name missing, for obvious reasons, is a White Hen Pantry convenience store. The last photo shows one of the last Turn-Styles, the location of which I’m not sure of.

Turn-Stylin'

After moving to quickly establish the first new Turnstyle West (technically it was the midwest) region stores upon buying out the company in 1962, Jewel proceeded much more slowly through the rest of the sixties. Having opened the Racine, Skokie and Harlem-Foster stores, two more Turnstyles would open in 1963, both of them in the Quad Cities – Moline, Illinois in May and Davenport, Iowa, in August. They would be the last new midwest Turnstyles for four years, when a “mini-Turnstyle” (35,000 sq. feet) was opened in Bettendorf, Iowa in 1967.

In 1964 the original Lynn, Massachusetts store, an outdated unit of only 45,000 square feet, was closed. The following February a brand-new 100,000 square foot Turnstyle opened in Quincy, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. This was part of a Jewel-owned “Family Center” and also included a Star Market and a Brigham’s. Brigham’s was a well-known Boston area chain of ice cream/sandwich/bakery shops that Jewel acquired as part of the Star Market transaction a year earlier. Brigham’s owned a baking division called Dorothy Muriel’s that eventually supplied baked goods to the Star Markets (I can still taste those great corn muffins from my childhood trips up there!). Things remained fairly quiet on the Turnstyle East front as well, with the only real action being the conversion of two Star Home Centers to Turnstyle stores, in Waltham, Mass. in 1966 and Franklin, Mass. the following year.

From a business standpoint, the early years of Jewel’s Turnstyle ownership were very difficult, with fairly substantial operating losses. In retrospect, it’s hard to say whether or not Jewel held off opening more Turnstyle stores in their key market, the Chicago area (where Turnstyle had barely scratched the surface) in order to refine the concept. It had to have taken longer than they planned.

In any event, their act was together by 1968 when a new Turn-Style (the name was hyphenated by this time) / Jewel Family Center opened in the North Point Shopping Center on Rand Road in Arlington Heights, Illinois, a bustling northwest suburban town. The following year, a new store opened in west suburban Glendale Heights. That year, 1969, marked a major turnaround for Turn-Style with all of the chain’s 13 stores operating at a profit.

In November 1971, two Turn-Style / Jewel Family Centers opened on the same day. One was in Schaumburg, Illinois, at the intersection of Golf and Meacham Roads, near the colossal new Woodfield Mall. This store is the one I remember shopping at the most. The other store was in the new “Jewel Village” Shopping Center in west suburban Westmont, Illinois, at the corner of Ogden and Cass Avenues. The Westmont store was located in a Jewel-owned shopping center that was unique in that it was used for a “proving ground” for some new Jewel retail concepts – “Case n’ Bottle” liquor stores, Village Fashions and a fabric/craft shop called “Stitch n’ Knit”. These didn’t end up flying as standalone concepts, although the liquor store idea was later folded into some Jewel stores.

In 1972, Jewel began to roll Turn-Style stores out to other areas, notably the Eisner territory, which was located in Central Illinois and Western Indiana, and had recently been extended to Indianapolis. They even opened some Family Centers in conjunction with non-Jewel supermarkets, pairing up two Omaha Turn-Styles, one with a Bakers supermarket, the other with a Hinky-Dinky.

The next year, Jewel tried its hand at the catalog showroom business. “Intrigued by (that) $2 billion business”, as they officially put it, the decision was made to open a catalog showroom area within five existing Chicago area Turn-Styles, which would be redubbed “Turn-Style Plus” stores. Deerfield, Niles, Arlington Heights, Schaumburg and Chicago (Grand and Kostner Avenues) were the “Plus” stores, each store setting aside an 8,000 selling floor and 15,000 of warehouse space to accommodate the venture. A 350-plus page Turn-Style Plus catalog was published for customers to use to make their buying decisions at home, call in an order (or write one up onsite) then flee to the store to pick it up. The catalog showroom concept was gaining popularity across the US at the time, with companies such as Service Merchandise and Best Products enjoying tremendous growth. The major catalog players in the Chicago area at the time were Bennett Brothers (still in business) and McDade and Company (now gone). The venture was not a success, and only a year later Jewel referred to it as an “experiment”.

The photos above are from the early 1970’s, that golden era of white wine, ferns, and brown mansard-roofed discount (and grocery) stores. The first shows the Jewel Village location in Westmont, Illinois, the second a Turn-Style / Eisner Family Center in Indianapolis, with a mile-long Olds Custom Cruiser in the foreground. The third photo is an unidentified Family Center and the last is of one of the five Turn-Style Plus stores.

And for more Turn-Stylin’, check out John Gallo’s new site, Stores Forever. John has been a longtime contributor to number of the old retail fansites, and has now started one of his own. John had the foresight to photograph many stores in his native Racine, Wisconsin/North Suburban Chicago areas in the 70’s and 80’s. His current post features a great shot of the Racine Turn-Style store as remodeled in the early 70’s, when the former Jewel had been converted to a “Big E” warehouse food store, a short-lived Jewel no-frills concept that fell under the Eisner wing. John has some great ShopKo stuff on there as well.

Someone Was There at the Turn-Style...

…the girl with kaleidoscope eyes. Yes, it’s time to pay tribute to the only discount store chain to ever be mentioned* in a Beatles song. I’m referring of course to Turn-Style, a presence if never really the major discount player in the Chicago and Boston areas throughout the sixties and seventies.

Turnstyle Operating Corporation (in the early years the name “Turnstyle” was not hyphenated) was founded with their first store in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1957. By the end of 1961, the company had four self-service department stores in the greater Boston area, ranging in size from 45,000 feet to their largest store, a 70,000 square foot unit in Lawrence, Mass.

On February 28, 1962, Chicago’s Jewel Tea Co. completed a year-long acquisition of the Turnstyle organization through an exchange of stock. Having gotten their feet wet in the area of non-food sales with their merger with Osco Drug the previous year, Jewel was keen to expand to the larger general merchandise format that Turnstyle afforded. In combination with their supermarkets (and occasionally an Osco as well) the “Family Center” concept would offer customers the proverbial “one-stop shop” for many of their everyday needs. The Turnstyle acquisition served another purpose for Jewel as well as it became the company’s first expansion territory outside the Midwest, not counting its European investments. The familiarity with the Boston area that Jewel management gained would pave the way for their merger with Star Market the following year.

The Turnstyle stores, as the name implied, had an emphasis on apparel, but carried extensive lines of housewares, small appliances, sporting goods, hardware items and phonograph records among other items. They also featured a pharmacy and a “delightful snack bar in the middle of the store”.

Jewel wasted little time in opening the first Turnstyle units in their primary Midwest market, with the first store, a 110,000 square foot “Turnstyle Family Center” opening in Racine, Wisconsin in March 1962. Exactly a year later, two more virtually identical family centers were opened, one at 9449 Skokie Boulevard in Skokie, IL, and the other at 7342 Foster Avenue in Chicago’s Harlem-Foster Shopping Center.

The photo above features one of the above-mentioned early Turnstyle units. A broader view of the Skokie store can be seen on the Digital Past website (note the Eagle Food Center sign to the left of the photo. This was taken several years before their acquisition by California’s Lucky Stores chain). Below is a March 3, 1963 grand opening ad for the two stores which appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

*unintentionally

White Hen Pantry, 1967

Mention 7-Eleven, and probably the first thing that comes to most people’s minds are the Slurpees that many of us guzzled as kids. Mention White Hen Pantry, a well-remembered Chicago and Boston-area convenience store chain, and the first things that come to my mind are the incredible iced brownies they used to sell. Over three-by-three inches square and darn near an inch tall, those Burny Bros. babies provided a guaranteed day long chocolate and sugar rush. And it’s a good thing we didn’t know about trans fats in those days.

The 1960’s were the breakout years for the convenience store industry. The first convenience stores – small roadside stores that specialized in sales of ice, milk , bread and few other staple items began to appear in the late 1920’s and early 30’s. Over time, these stores evolved into “small grocery stores”, adding a broader line of foods and various sundries to the mix. Ultimately, many convenience stores would add gasoline sales, either in partnership with a major oil company brand or through “private label” gas purchased through oil jobbers. By the late fifties and early sixties, convenience stores were fairly widespread nationally. The industry at the time was made up of a number of small regional convenience chains and one major player, the Dallas-based Southland Corporation, better known by the name of their stores - 7-Eleven. Ubiquitous in many Texas and Florida markets, The 60’s would see 7-Eleven become a national brand with Southland’s aggressive expansion into the Northeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountain and Southern California markets. In January 1966, Southland announced plans to open its first stores in the Chicago area, with 25 stores scheduled to open within the year, nearly all (initially) in the Northwest suburbs. These stores would report to Southland’s new district headquarters in Rolling Meadows.

Jewel Tea Company, owner of Chicago’s market leading Jewel Food Stores and the recently acquired Star Markets, a popular Boston-area chain, was already well underway with its own convenience store concept at the time. Jewel’s first convenience stores were slated to open in the Chicago area in 1965 under the less-than memorable name of “Kwik Shoppe”.

Around that same time, Jewel made an investment with an Illinois agricultural firm, the White Hen Egg Farm, in order to ensure a steady supply of high-quality eggs to their retail stores. Wisely, they ditched the Kwik Shoppe name (not to be confused with Kwik-E-Mart, heh heh) and adopted the name “White Hen Pantry” for the new stores. Tapping into nostalgia for simpler times with a milk-glass hen dish as their trademark, the first three White Hen Pantries were opened as planned in 1965.

White Hen Pantry was unique within the Jewel organization in that it was a franchised operation, with each store independently owned and operated. For a franchise fee of $15,000 ($12,000 of which went for inventory), Jewel would set a new White Hen owner/operator up with a complete business – store, inventory, training, accounting and distribution services, a fairly sweet deal even for those pre-inflationary times. The new owner/operators were often fairly young (30-ish) married couples, who would run the stores as a true family business. A number of the early White Hen franchisees were previously Jewel Food Store managers who had proven their mettle with the company and were given priority when new White Hen stores were planned. Jewel took no percentage until a given store was profitable, and after that they received a 12% cut of store profits.

A couple of things made White Hen unique within the convenience store industry as well. First, they did not sell gasoline, preferring suburban strip centers for many of their earlier locations, later expanding into urban locations. Secondly, each store had an extensive delicatessen and bakery counter, a particular point of pride and a rarity in those days long before Subway popped up in seemingly every gas station/convenience store on earth.

The White Hen Pantries complemented Jewel’s full-line supermarkets nicely, offering customers extended shopping hours in an era when Jewel and Jewel-Osco stores closed at 9pm in most cases and the great majority of them were closed altogether on Sundays. By 1969, 44 White Hens were in operation in the Chicago area and the first Boston area stores were opened to leverage the Star Market territory there. Eventually, a number of White Hens would be opened in Jewel’s downstate Eisner area as well.

The following 15 years would see steady growth with no major changes to the White Hen operation until 1984, when Jewel was taken over by Salt Lake City-based American Stores Company. American’s chairman Sam Skaggs signaled his intentions to build a food and drug titan, and made it known that convenience stores didn’t fit into his plans. White Hen, with some 240 Chicago locations and 50 Boston locations at the time, would be put up for sale. The White Hen management team, some of whom had been there from the beginning in 1965, expressed their desire to put together an offer to buy the company. Skaggs opted instead to place White Hen on the open market, ripe for the taking to the highest bidder. And the bidders came – Southland/7-Eleven, Convenient Food Mart (a local competitor based in Rosemont, Illinois), Los Angeles-based Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), who operated a number of their “Am/Pm Mini-Markets” in the greater Chicago area, and the White Hen management group, who had secured enough funding to be competitive. Happily, the White Hen team won out, and the company “fell into loving hands”, as the Chicago Tribune put it at the time.

In 2001, White Hen Pantry agreed to be sold to Clark Retail Enterprises, who would immediately divest the Boston area stores to a new entity, called New England Pantry, Inc. Clark itself ran into trouble soon afterward, declaring bankruptcy in 2003. A group led by Brandon Barnhart, the former CEO of Clark purchased White Hen in November of that year, and the “pantry” portion of the name was dropped. The end of the White Hen era, at least in the Chicago area, was signaled in August 2006 when White Hen was bought out by arch rival 7-Eleven. The stores have undergone a slow but sure conversion to the 7-Eleven banner since that time.
Note: Larry of the great Diner Hotline, a Massachusetts resident, rightly points out that White Hen Pantries still exist in the Boston area.

The photos below are all circa 1973. The first two views are of a typical suburban store - an exterior (albeit with non-standard signage) and an interior view showing a portion of the vaunted bakery counter. The last view shows the White Hen Pantry that was located on the ground floor of McClurg Court, a high-rise apartment complex that was definitely one of the hotter Chicago addresses in the 1970’s.