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!

A Very Good Start For Zayre

Although the first Zayre department store didn’t open until 1956, the chain’s beginnings date back to 1919, with the formation of The New England Trading Company, an underwear and hosiery wholesaler. Founded in the Boston area by brothers Max and Morris Feldberg, the company began as a supplier to full-line department stores and specialty shops. Ten years later, the brothers launched their first retail operation, Bell Hosiery Shops (later shortened to “Bell Shops”). Within a few years, the Bell Shops product line began to expand beyond underwear and hosiery to include other clothing lines. By the mid-30’s, the Bell Shops were full-blown women’s’ specialty stores, competing against such chains as Lerner Shops and Three Sisters. There were nearly 30 Bell Shops in the New England area by the end of World War II.

In 1946, the company doubled its store count with its buyout of New York City-based Nugents, another women’s’ specialty store chain with a great deal of similarity in approach to Bell Shops. The Nugents chain (whose name would be retained), with its store base in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Washington, DC provided a natural extension of the company’s market area with virtually no overlap.

By the early 1950’s, the company’s sales had reached a plateau, and it became clear to the Feldbergs that fairly drastic changes would need to be undertaken in order for their business to remain viable. Despite classy remodelings, and in some cases the opening of larger stores, the Bell Shops/Nugents stores were losing ground due to two important trends, among others – the decline of downtown business districts (with notable exceptions, such as the Quincy and Malden, Massachusetts locations, where the city fathers had the foresight to provide large downtown free parking areas) and the rise of the “mill” discount store operations, a trend that literally rose up in the company’s backyard.

With the family’s second generation, Stanley H. Feldberg (son of Max) and Sumner A. Feldberg (son of Morris) now in positions of high responsibility, the company began to explore its options. A considerable effort was put into studying the wildly successful mill stores, particularly Cumberland, Rhode Island-based Ann and Hope. The mill stores – Ann and Hope, Mammoth Mart, J.M. Fields and others, shared a common formula for success. With a host of closed, empty textile mills available at dirt-cheap rents, these companies began operation selling mainly clothing, linens and other softlines. Eventually space was leased out to other firms offering such items as shoes, jewelry, tools or appliances, starting the tradition of leased departments in discount stores. As these companies became more prosperous, they began to build their own new stores, either free-standing and/or in shopping centers, allowing much greater visibility along with the many other benefits of custom-built facilities. In a sense, these firms eventually assumed the characteristics of a traditional “chain store” corporate structure.

Having settled on discounting as the logical new direction in which to take their company, the Feldbergs decided to forgo the “mill building” route, preferring to launch with a newly constructed store when the opportunity presented itself. In late 1955, that opportunity came when Stop & Shop, Inc. approached with an offer to build them a store alongside a new Stop & Shop supermarket to be constructed in Hyannis, Massachusetts. In June 1956, the Hyannis Zayre store opened, a whopping 5,000 square feet in size. The store was soon expanded to 7,500 and then 10,000 square feet, and was replaced in 1962 with a 45,000 square foot unit directly behind it. The second Zayre opened in September 1956 in the Roslindale section of Boston, with a much larger footprint of 39,000 square feet. Within a few years, Zayre stores would typically average 70,000 to 90,000 square feet.

Longtime New York Times retail writer Isadore Barmash explained the origin of the chain’s name in a 1985 article – “One day, the Feldbergs and Bert Stern, an advertising consultant, were casting around for possible names for the new operation when Max broke off to take a call. He ended his phone conversation with a typical Jewish phrase: ‘Zehr gut’ or ‘very good.’ Mr. Stern repeated ‘Zehr, where, we need a nice-sounding name.’ The men stared at one another. ‘Zehr – let’s spell it Zayre’ – for very good, they decided.” And thus, Zayre became part of the discounting pantheon.

By 1961, there were fifteen Zayre stores in operation, racking up $50 million in annual sales. Much faster growth would come in the early 1960’s. Zayre was off to a “very good” start, to be sure.

Pictured above is a circa 1962 Zayre store in the standard configuration that so many of us grew up with. Below are exterior and interior shots of the first Zayre store (tiny by comparison) in Hyannis, Massachusetts, shortly after its opening.

Fazio's California Adventure

Under management by the Fazio/Costa group, Fisher Foods became widely recognized as one of America’s fastest-growing supermarket chains at the end of the 1960’s, going into the early 70’s. The company had begun a successful expansion program, adding other key Ohio markets to their original Cleveland base. The acquisition of the Dominick’s chain in Chicago was bearing fruit as well, and the purchase of Kroger’s remaining Chicago stores in 1970 would more than double their presence there.

To keep the momentum going, the Southern California market was chosen as Fisher’s next expansion frontier. On June 12, 1972, a purchase agreement was announced between Fisher Foods and the Dayton-based E.F. MacDonald Company, owner of the Shopping Bag supermarkets, a 46-store chain with regional headquarters in San Gabriel, California and stores throughout the SoCal market. MacDonald, known best as the owner of Plaid Stamps, was eager to sell the operation, which had been losing money.

Shopping Bag Food Stores began its existence with one small grocery store on L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard in 1930. Three years later, Shopping Bag would open its first supermarket, and the company would grow with the area from there, going public in 1954. In 1960, Shopping Bag was merged into Vons Grocery Company, adding its 38 stores to Vons’ 28. The Shopping Bag units would continue to operate under their original name. In 1965, The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Vons in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleging that the Vons/Shopping Bag merger served to lessen grocery competition in the area. Initially, Vons won the case, but the Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, who in a landmark ruling the following year ordered Vons to divest the Shopping Bag stores. The whole proceeding seems almost laughable today, considering the favorable eye the FTC has cast upon much larger mergers through the last 30 years or so, truly setting up a “mega-merger’’ climate.

In June 1967, Vons completed the sale of 40 stores (35 Shopping Bags and 5 Vons) to E.F. MacDonald. The MacDonald firm was founded by Elton “Mac” MacDonald, who in 1957 had sold out his 1/3 interest in Top Value Stamps, the brand used by Kroger and Boston’s Stop and Shop, among others. After initially turning away from the trading stamp biz when he ventured off on his own, MacDonald created Plaid Stamps and landed a huge customer for them at the dawn of the sixties– The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, who had previously resisted the trading stamp trend with vehemence. Eventually, competitive pressures and the pleas of A&P district managers led the company to adopt the stamps in a number of its regions.

A successful supplier to the industry, now MacDonald would try its own hand as a supermarket operator, in arguably the most dynamic market of all. They would modernize some stores, open new ones, and sell off a good number of the smaller units. MacDonald made a bold move in 1969 when they bought out A&P’s 31 supermarkets (adding to the 40 existing Shopping Bags at the time) in the Los Angeles, ending A&P’s presence there. A&P, having decided that they would need twice their present number of stores in Southern California to maintain a profitable operation there, opted instead to throw in the towel. The A&P stores were converted to Shopping Bags.

In 1972, having whittled down the Shopping Bag store count to 46 stores, MacDonald agreed to sell them to Fisher Foods. The stores would be rebranded “Fazio’s-Shopping Bag” and would shift to the ever-popular “every day low price” strategy, ditching trading stamps (Ironically, Shopping Bag gave out Blue Chip Stamps, the standard for most SoCal grocery chains, instead of MacDonald’s own Plaid stamps) along the way. The stores were remodeled, and deli and bakery departments were brought up to Fisher standards. Marshall Italiano was placed in charge, reporting to John Fazio in Cleveland. Ground was broken for a new office and distribution center in City of Industry, and the first all-new Fazio’s-Shopping Bag store was slated to open in the fall of 1974 in Fountain Valley.

The California (ad)venture didn’t last long, unfortunately. The troubled economy of the mid-70’s and Fisher’s growing internal and financial problems were largely to blame. Also, a couple of embarrassing incidents – charges of false advertising and mislabeling – made the news, affecting the company’s reputation. In 1978, the Fazio-Shopping Bag stores were sold to Albertsons.

The photos above are from 1973 and 1972 respectively, and show two Shopping Bag stores freshly rebranded to add the Fazio’s name. If you click on the enlargement of the second photo, you can see three original signs with the classic Shopping Bag logo, two backlit signs above the entrance doors and a neon sign (barely visible) on the right side, near the edge of the photo. Below is a full-page display ad from late 1972, trumpeting the ownership change and new pricing policy.

I’d love to know the location of those two stores. If anyone can advise on that, I’ll gladly give them a free one-year subscription to this site.

Oh wait, it’s already free…
In that case, a free “thank you” instead!

Thanks to Jeff for identifying the store in the second picture as the one located at 1000 E. Valley in Alhambra, and for bringing us up to date on that location: "It was remodeled in the late 70's and again in the 90's. Most of the glass in the front was taken off. This store was later converted into an Albertsons, then a Grocery Warehouse, then a Max Foods, now a Lucky store. That tower lasted until the 2nd remodel".

Jeff has come through for us once again, identifying the first store location as 1611 W Whittier in La Habra. He visited this location and found: What looks like a neighborhood in the back sorta matches.- The brick is still on 2 sides of the building- The Sign is still in the same spot on the store- The light to the left of the sign is present today.- The driveway is there but could have been refigured. The store over the years though has been remodeled at least two times.

Thanks, Jeff!

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!

Stop & Shop's Sign of the Times

Here is a 1980’s photo of a great vintage Stop & Shop sign (with a clock, yet - always a welcome sight) from the 1957 Medford, Massachusetts store that was shown in a previous post and appears again in the second photo above. The sign photo comes to us through the courtesy of Larry Cultrera, a Medford native and host of a very entertaining and informative new website, Diner Hotline, which features great articles about and photos of that beloved American icon, the diner. Larry wrote a column on diners for many years for the Society for Commercial Archeology’s Journal before moving it to the wider internet audience this past October. Check his site out! Larry provides background on the photo as follows:

“I took the shot of the sign as I recall after Stop & Shop had moved to the other end of the parking lot (into a Super Stop & Shop) where Holiday Lanes (10 pin bowling alley) used to be, the sign remained by the old store for a while. Ironically as we speak, that newer Stop & Shop is inthe process of being replaced by an even newer one. The new one will be located next to the Stop & Shop gas station that sits at a right angle to the current store.

An old Ames Department Store was torn down (originally Zayre's). Zayre's and the Stop & Shop you have pictures of were the first 2 stores built in the Fellsway Shopping Plaza, Stop & Shop on the left end and Zayre's on the right. There were no buildings connecting them for a short time untilthey built the actual plaza that connected the 2 end buildings.”

One more note on the photo – in the background a “Medi-Mart” sign can be seen on a storefront with a logo style very similar to Stop & Shop’s late 60’s/70’s logo. Medi-Mart was a drugstore division of Stop & Shop that at its peak had 66 stores, most (not surprisingly) near Stop & Shop locations. Stop & Shop sold the division to Walgreens in 1986 in what at the time was Walgreens’ largest acquisition.

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.

Navigating the Stop & Shop

Here are a couple of nice 1960 interior views of Stop & Shop’s Natick, Massachusetts store. In addition to the great use of color and the classy design scheme (standard for S & S at the time), they also show a wall-length store directory – something that was a very common feature of chain supermarkets from the 1940’s through the sixties. These directories are now very rarely seen, the valuable wall space now usually taken up by…uh…nothing. Granted, stores were smaller then and the full span of the wall would have been more easily visible because of this.

I look at this and think it would be nice to have them back – maybe an electronic plasma screen version, like the highly graphical, ever larger ones used for airport arrival/departure boards. C’mon, marketing people!

Stop & Shop's Showstopper

One of the great buzz-phrases of the 1960’s was “urban renewal”. If the term were coined today, one might think it meant restoring historic buildings for modern-day uses. Unfortunately, the phrase at the time essentially meant tearing blocks of vintage buildings down and building new stuff in their place. Thousands of wonderful old buildings all across America fell to this process from late 50’s through the early 70’s.

Occasionally some new gems arose, however, and the above-pictured Central Plaza of Lowell, Massachusetts, which opened in December 1961, is a fantastic example of this. Recognized as the “first completed commercial redevelopment project in the country” by the federal Urban Renewal Administration and widely acclaimed for its striking modern architecture, the project was spearheaded by Stop & Shop and its fellow Massachusetts corporate neighbor, Natick-based Zayre.

The photo above was taken shortly after the shopping center’s opening, and shows a nice view of the surrounding area as well. The triple-peaked store to the right of the Stop & Shop is the Zayre store, and if you click on the enlargement, the “Zayre” name will become a bit more visible below the left-most peak. The shopping center still exists, but both original anchors are long gone (Zayre, of course, is long gone in the broad sense as well), and an assortment of smaller stores have taken their place.

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.

Stop & Shop - The Postwar Years

By 1945, Stop & Shop had nearly 450 stores, most of which operated in the self-service format. In September of the following year, the company formally changed its name to “Stop & Shop, Inc.”. The photos above are typical of the company’s stores of the early postwar period, showing two urban locations – Springfield and Lynn, Massachusetts, and an early shopping center location in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. In the next decade, Stop & Shop would replace many of their smaller urban stores as part of a concentrated push into shopping centers, gaining the advantages of much larger footprints and ample free parking.

The Early Days of Stop & Shop

Stop & Shop, a fixture on the New England retail landscape and long its dominant grocery chain, began humbly with a single store in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1914. Founded as Economy Grocery Stores by Julius Rabinovitz, the chain grew rapidly but soon began losing money. In 1920, Rabinovitz sold the business to his brother Joseph. Joseph’s son Sidney was a Harvard graduate with considerable ingenuity and marketing skills who had joined the business to assist his uncle in 1918, and soon began to implement policies that would ultimately turn the company around. (Sidney, along with his two brothers who would themselves join the company a few years later, shortened the family surname to Rabb.) In 1924, Economy became a public company and in 1930, at the ripe age of 29, Sidney Rabb was named chairman, a position he would hold for 55 years until his 1985 death.

A true innovator and visionary, Rabb implemented the low price concept long in Economy’s stores long before it became standard industry practice. The most significant innovation, however, came in 1935 with company’s introduction of the first (and Boston’s first, for that matter) self-service supermarket, called the “Stop & Shop Foodmart”, which was located on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a former factory building. The Stop & Shop name was born, although the company would formally be known as “Economy Grocery Stores” until 1946.

The photos above are in reverse chronological order, showing first a typical late 1930’s Stop & Shop (“hamburg”, scallops and clams – how New England can you get?), secondly the company’s first supermarket, as mentioned above, in a 1930’s photo, and lastly, one of the company’s earliest stores.

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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