Suburban Shopping in the 1970's!

…and now for something completely different! Here’s an overview of the chain retail scene from a single suburban town from the year 1976 – the town in this case being Addison, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. Since the majority of the chains shown in this post are (or were) national or at least multi-regional, many of you will probably get a kick out of this. If you’re from the Chicago area, these photos should be a special treat, as nearly all the companies pictured should be familiar, and if you grew up in the Addison area, I suspect the floodgates will open.

These photos are the work of Mr. Joe Archie, longtime Addison resident. Joe and his wife, Jeanette, have put together an incredible photographic record of the area’s history through the years, along with the history of their family. Be sure to check out their wonderful Flickr page to see more of their photos, including some very nice downtown Chicago views. Joe took this set of photos in 1976 as part of a project to document their hometown during America’s Bicentennial year. My utmost gratitude goes to them for allowing us to enjoy these great photos, and for continuing to document these all-too-often overlooked aspects of American life.

Some of these chains have been covered in depth here before, and others I eventually hope to get around to, so we’ll dispense with the hardcore history this time around. Instead, I’ll just toss out a few facts and throw in some memories here and there. As always, I welcome your own memories in the comments section.

Also, we’ll make an exception to the rule here, and expand the site’s normal scope just a bit to include some of the popular chain restaurants of the day. I mean, we have to eat, don’t we?

And we’ll have the radio on as we drive – with any luck there’ll be something decent playing – maybe some Steely Dan or Queen or Boston, or even some 10cc or Wings. Of course, there’s always the likely chance that Dad will pop in his 8-track of Neil Diamond’s “Hot August Night” (1972 double-live album) for the 3,700th time. Oh come on, it’s not like you don’t sing along with every word!

First up is Zayre, a suburban Chicago fixture with 27 stores in the area by that time. The store pictured is the classic early Zayre with the massive glassed storefront and the even more massive signage. I particularly like the Auto Center close-up, with very nice glazed brick and blue flashing (just like the main store) and a simple, clean appearance. As I noted at the beginning of a series of Zayre posts done last year, my family pretty much dropped Zayre like a hot brick when Kmart came around. Seeing these photos years later, with that beautiful row of blue diamonds above the entrance doors (and it also looked great after the 1978 brown-and-orange revamp), I’m sitting here with pangs of regret. Were we too hasty?

Come back Zayre, I’ll let you be my store!!

The Mighty Jewel - then as now, Chicago’s supermarket powerhouse - looking mighty well in classic 70’s aggregate and mixed brick in this location at Addison's Green Meadows Shopping Center. The bold orange signage for this store was rendered in a font that the company had been using for over 40 years by then. The following year, it would be replaced with a new logotype that would eventually grace the Addison store when it was remodeled a few years later. Interestingly, both Jewel and their top competitor Dominick’s would switch from orange to red-orange logos in the 1980’s.

Jewel, pronounced correctly, is a one syllable word – “Jool.” It’s just another one of those fun, idiosyncratic Chicago pronunciations, like “melk” instead of “milk”. (I’m not kidding.) And as noted before, “Jewels” or “The Jewel” are perfectly acceptable forms of usage. Never “The Jewels”, though, lest one risk jumping the shark.

Donimick's Finer Foods (Pronounced Dah-min-ick’s, with heavy emphasis on the first syllable. Typical usage: “Oh, we’re out of melk? Crap, I just got back from Dominick’s!”) was a fairly small chain as recently as the late 60’s, but by 1976 was growing like wildfire, with over 60 supermarkets by then, bypassing such longtime Chicago stalwarts as A&P and (the newly departed) National Food Stores on its way to becoming number two in the market, second only to Jewel, which is still the case today. This very attractive store, located on Army Trail Road in Addison, opened in 1973, and is typical of the stores they were putting up all over Chicagoland. I drove by this store this past January, and sadly it is now closed. The two stores we shopped at were older, one at the Market Place shopping center in Des Plaines on the corner of Elmhurst and Golf Roads, and the other in Rolling Meadows on Kirchoff Road, but they had the same “letterboxed” signage. Nearly all Dominick’s stores flew the orange flags in those days, a great touch.

As said in a previous post, Dominick’s strength was their excellent selection of ethnic foods, and the chain held an Italian food fair for years that always managed to attract lots of customers and press attention. Also mentioned previously were the great Heinemann’s bakeries, with their superb Butter-Ritz cakes and homemade cookies. Ironically, the Heinemann’s line is not available today at Dominick’s, but is at Jewel. I still can’t get used to that.

Guido’s was an independent chain in the Chicago area. We shopped at the Hoffman Estates store once in a while during the year or so we lived in the area. Don’t know a lot about them, other than the fact that they had four stores in the early 70’s - this Addison location, Westchester, Berkeley (honored by Progressive Grocer magazine in the mid-60’s as a “Store of the Month”) and the above-mentioned Hoffman location which was closed due to poor profitability in 1973. I’m assuming that the rest of the chain ceased operation sometime not too long after that.

It’s interesting to note that Guido’s also had the Heinemann’s bakery franchise. The once-mighty (and by 1976, gone) National Food Stores had it as well, but certainly it was associated closest with Dominick’s.

Goldblatt Bros. was a classic, full-line department store with deep Chicago roots. This store, located in the Green Meadows Shopping Center in Addison, opened in the spring of 1962. Like a couple of other Chicago department store institutions, Marshall Field & Company and Wieboldt Stores, Inc., they chose green as their corporate color. Of more substance, perhaps, is the fact that like those other two companies, Goldblatts was early to establish suburban branches, as exemplified by this store and several others, including the one we shopped at in Mt. Prospect Plaza, and other locations such as the Scottsdale Shopping Center near Burbank, Illinois and at Elmwood Plaza in Racine, Wisconsin. In the early 60’s there were 31 Goldblatt’s stores in total.

Since Randhurst Center, with its triple-threat of Wards, Carsons and Wieboldt’s was just down the street from our local Mt. Prospect Goldblatts, our family usually gave them the short shrift, I’m sorry to say. Goldblatt’s seemed to target a slightly lower income demographic than the chains I’ve just named, and for a time the strategy worked very well. In time, it was competition from the discount chains rather than other department stores that caused them the most problems. Pulling out of a bankruptcy in the mid-1980’s, Goldblatts hung on for a long time but never really hit its stride again, finally closing up for good in 2003.

Sporting a nice example of one of my all-time favorite retail logos, the Addison JCPenney Catalog Outlet already had a vintage look by 1976. Unlike Sears and Wards, whose catalogs dated back to days of old, for Penney’s it was a relatively recent venture – a business they entered through acquisition, when they bought out Milwaukee-based General Merchandise Company in 1964. That company’s catalog essentially became the “Penney’s catalog”. Several of these catalog outlet stores were actually attached to the company’s distribution centers. Later on, this store was replaced by a new store at nearby North Park Mall, which itself is now closed.

We’ll talk about Portillo’s, the restaurant to the left of the photo, (Dig that “hot dog” sign! It’s long gone but lives on on all Portillo’s packaging.) in a bit, but for the moment I wanted to focus on the Ace Hardware store. Before the days of the all-inclusive “home center” – currently active firms like Lowe’s, Home Depot and Menards (primarily Midwestern locations) and now-defunct companies such as Grossman’s, Courtesy, Home Quarters, Hechinger’s, Handy Dan, etc., one pretty much bought lumber at a lumber yard and hardware at a hardware store. For us, that hardware store was the Ace Hardware in the Rolling Meadows Shopping Center. My Dad was (and is) the consummate handyman, so it was the rare Saturday morning that we didn’t stop in at Ace at least briefly. The Addison Ace looks to be of 1950’s or very early 60’s vintage.

Anyone who watched much TV in the 1970’s would have to remember the commercials with sultry-voiced actress Connie Stevens singing “Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man”, after which she would put her arm around some guy in a red Ace vest who was trying his best not to smile too broadly. In the early 80’s, Connie was replaced by NFL coaching/broadcasting legend John Madden with a modified slogan suited to fit his regular guy persona – “I gotta tell ya, Ace is the place for me.”

“The old 5 and 10’s” were definitely a dying breed by the mid-70’s, though most of the venerable old names, including the once-great Ben Franklin, were still hanging on by a thread at the time. My own family had long since passed them by in favor of Kmart, The Treasury, Venture and the other much larger discount stores.

It’s interesting to see how the Addison Ben Franklin was by then trying to position itself as a “hobby and craft” niche supplier. In light of the competition, it was probably a wise move. (Notice one of the signs mentions macramé. I remember my family selling a huge macramé wall hanging at a garage sale in the early 80’s, and a lady came up asking “How much for the ‘ma-crayme’?” I thought we were gonna die!)

In truth, I know next to nothing about the Big “R”, but it sure has that wild, kooky discount store look, and probably was a fun place to shop. Close to Addison, this store was actually located in nearby Villa Park, on North Avenue near Addison Road. The earliest newspaper ad I’ve located for the Big “R” dates back to 1962, but the store might well be older than that. Notice the colonial flags (with the famous “Don’t Tread On Me” flag to the far left) – a nice touch for the Bicentennial year. Sadly, the store appears to have been in the proverbial “throes” based on the liquidation signs in the windows. If anyone can fill us in on the Big “R” experience, I’d be glad to update this section. Thanks.

Update 10/6/09 - Several people have written to inform us that the Big "R" property was the birthplace of an important piece of Chicago-area pop culture - Dick Portillo's first hot dog stand, "The Dog House", forerunner to the wildly popular Portillo's chain, was located at the edge of the store's parking lot! Opened in 1963, the hot dog stand, which as mentioned was actually a trailer, didn't even have running water, and actually used a 250' long water hose hooked up to an adjacent building. "The Dog House" is a revered part of the company's heritage, and I believe every modern Portillo's has a picture of it somewhere on their walls. The Big "R"'s place in history is secure, and I, for one, am very relieved!

A sad sight indeed is this vacant, boarded up Topps Department Store on North Avenue in Addison. The original Topps at this location opened (to great fanfare, as was their style) in 1962, but was completely destroyed by fire four years later. The replacement store was built in the updated Topps image. This store closed in 1974 along with the rest of the chain, and so had already sat empty for some time when this photo was taken. Later on, the store became a Syms clothing outlet, which it remains to this day. I shopped there a few times, and remember their commercials featuring company founder Sy Syms with the well-known tagline – “An educated consumer is our best customer”.

Almost forgot this one, because these stores weren’t around long. Robert Hall Village was intended to be a successor to the well-known Robert Hall clothing stores, the retail face of a garment manufacturer called United Merchants and Manufacturers, Inc. Mr. Archie, in his original photo caption sums it up: “Robert Hall was a city chain whose slogans alluded to "Plain pipe racks" and "Low rent". They didn't do so well in the suburbs.” My Dad shared that view (that they carried “low end” clothes), and because of that didn’t shop there much. I personally made one significant purchase at Robert Hall, though - when I was seven years old, I bought Dad an electric yellow pair of golf socks for his birthday. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t wear them all the time!

Robert Hall Village was UM&M’s attempt to broaden the appeal of Robert Hall by expanding it into a “total discount store” concept – clothes, sporting goods, automotive, electronics and even groceries. The Chicago Tribune’s George Lazarus explained the rationale: “If Robert Hall can attract milady with an apparel special, the firm stands a good chance of selling her some groceries while she is in the Village.” Several Robert Hall Villages were opened across the country, including five in 1973 in the Chicago area – Downers Grove, Homewood, Crystal Lake, Hoffman Estates and the pictured North Park Mall unit in Villa Park. If they were trying to emulate a Turn-Style, Topps or Korvettes, they did a pretty good job, unfortunately, since those chains were in awful shape by the mid-70’s, and were “tubesville” before decade’s end. “Milady” wasn’t impressed. Upon the chain’s closure in 1977, two of the units, Downers Grove and Villa Park, became Kmarts.

For me, one memory of Robert Hall Village stands out. We visited the Hoffman Estates store during its grand opening (1973), and it’s the first time I remember seeing an electronic digital calculator. These were beautiful desk models, manufactured by the Japanese firm Miida (My-eeda), and were priced heftily at around $200 up to $350 or so. Of course, you can now get the same functionality at Dollar Tree for…well, a dollar!

You’d think that my main interest in this photo would be the great-looking, antebellum style “Type-C” Sears store, with the classic 60’s serif version of the logo. As nice as that is, having grown up in the Chicago area, the “Playback” store to the right (unfortunately much of the sign isn’t visible) is a rare, wonderful sight. For anyone who came of age there in the 70’s and 80’s, Playback, a now defunct stereo/electronics chain, was legendary. Oh, the hours spent there, drooling over $500 Pioneer car stereos and $1200 Blaupunkts, when the car I was driving at the time was worth somewhere between the two! Playback also had one of the most memorable commercial jingles of the day – I wish I could find a copy of it to link to. It was simply the company name and tagline - “Playback – the electronic playground!” sung in a cool layered-harmony, a cappella, stretched out style, sort of like the opening verse of the Kansas song “Carry On, Wayward Son”.

Fayva was a deep-discount shoe store chain, very similar in concept to Payless. As far as I know, my family may have shopped there once or twice, but I only vaguely remember it. Fayva was division of Massachusetts-based Morse Shoe, Inc., which also operated shoe departments in a number of discount chains. (As a kid, I did visit the bizarrely fascinating, long-since closed museum founded by Ira Morse in Warren, New Hampshire. The guy loved to hunt, let’s just say.) Fayva was a major TV advertiser in Chicago, and I assume elsewhere as well.

Next door is a Rexall drug store, sporting a very nice sign with the brand-new ‘70’s Rexall logo. A national institution for decades, Rexall ‘s glory days were by then largely past, and their parent company, Dart and Kraft, was royally ticking off loyal Rexall franchisees around this time by opening up the product line to other chains. Not long afterward, the franchisees were dropped altogether, their contracts cancelled. Ironically, Dart and Kraft “invited” them to continue to keep their Rexall signage installed as a means of promoting Rexall products. Most declined, understandably, although a few drugstores still fly the orange and blue to this day.

Kinney was easily the best known “family shoe store” of the 60’s and 70’s. We shopped there a bit, but most of our shoe bucks went elsewhere, mostly to local family owned shoe stores. They were another mega-TV advertiser.

From 1962 on a division of the F.W. Woolworth Company, Kinney had over 600 stores at its peak, the majority of which were the “roadside” style buildings that looked exactly like the one pictured - an extremely familiar sight for millions of Americans. Family shoe stores, like family restaurants, are largely a thing of the past, and it seems (in all but the luxury shoe market, at least) that the key to success for a shoe store chain is to follow either the sports or discount model. Woolworth themselves realized this some time ago, so by the end of the nineties the Kinney stores were history. From that point all resources were poured into Foot Locker.

You’ve heard of Walgreens, right? Pretty hard to miss ‘em, seeing as they’re popping up on prime street corners everywhere in what has to be the most aggressive real estate strategy in all of retail - one that has all the appearances of a 50-to-100 year plan. It’s interesting to watch as they battle it out with CVS in the drugstore version of “last man standing”, but if the old adage “location, location, location” holds true, it’s hard to see how they can lose.

Even thirty-some years ago Walgreens was a big player, especially in their home market of Chicago. But as you can see they weren’t nearly as picky about locations, even to the point of taking over an existing store in a shopping center that would easily been 10 to 15 years old at the time, as this photo of the “new” store in the Green Meadow Shopping Center in Addison shows. Perhaps they took over one of their old “Walgreen Agency” franchised stores, a category that was being phased out at the time.

“When you run out, run out to White Hen!”, the classic commercial went. White Hen Pantry, the franchised convenience store division of Jewel, had been around 10 years by this time, and had multitudes of locations in Chicagoland, especially in the Northwest and West Suburbs. Home of a basic selection of groceries, newspapers and magazines, a great deli and brownies extraordinaire, these were always a great place to stop.

Looking at the photo, the “Open 6 to 11” sign jumps out at me. Gosh, I wonder whose competitive nose they were trying to tweak? Unfortunately, the competitor eventually won out, and this store, like most all other White Hens in Chicago, is now a 7-Eleven. Somehow “When you run out, run out to the Sev!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Many of the New England area White Hens, the chain’s other major market, are still going strong.

Wow, looking at the picture of this Denny’s restaurant, the design is even nicer than I remembered! A worthy successor to the famous first-generation “Googie” Denny’s stores, this is seventies design at its finest. Inside it was all orange and brown, red and purple. The Rolling Meadows, Illinois Denny’s, where we usually went, looked just like this Addison unit.

We ate there a lot in those days, my dad, brother and I, usually for breakfast on Saturdays. Of course, later on in college and my early twenties, I learned just how late (or early) “Always Open” really meant! “Last stop of the night”, so to speak, after a concert or other late night activity. These days, with kids of my own, Denny’s is pretty much back on breakfast duty, at least every now and then. Sure wish our local one looked like this!

Three mainstays of the 1976 fast food scene against a backdrop of cloudy skies. Dunkin’ Donuts (“World’s Finest Coffee- Donuts made fresh every 4 hours” – Awesome!) we’ll talk about them in just a sec. The Burger King, sporting the 70’s sign in the parking lot and the 60’s lettering on the building, needs a bit of shingle work. All that’s visible of the McDonald’s here is the famous “Golden Arches” sign. “10 Billion Served, it reads. Nowadays there are 10 Billion McDonald’s restaurants, aren’t there?

In this day and age, I think it would be really cool if McDonald’s switched to a satellite-fed digital readout for the “Billions Served” portion of the sign. Many of these haven’t been updated in years, or feature the “Billions and Billions Served” copout. The technology isn’t that expensive anymore, and it wouldn’t even have to be updated in real time - weekly or even monthly would suffice. I think it would be a fun gimmick, and the numbers would no doubt be impressive as heck.

(Special note to McDonald’s executives: Information on where to send royalty checks for the aforementioned idea can be obtained by contacting “Dave” at the email address in the Profile section of this website. Thank you.)

Long before America ran on Dunkin’, we still liked it a whole lot. Dunkin’ Donuts is a much revered institution in the Chicago area, possibly just slightly less so than in their native New England, where they’re as common as fire hydrants. This particular prototype brings back such wonderful memories for me. The ones we frequented the most – Des Plaines on Elmhurst Road and Rolling Meadows on Kirchoff – looked just like it. This was another proverbial “Saturday stop”, oftentimes between Ace Hardware and Dominick’s. (The thing I’m really digging about these photos and writing this post is reliving the old routines, and the way they’re coming back to me in such detail, which hopefully I’m not boring you with. Wow, has time flown!) When we were very young, my brother and I would peer through the window where we could watch them make the donuts and occasionally the cook, who didn’t look at all like that little guy on TV, would give us free ones hot off the press (and those suckers were hot, trust me), the chocolate honey-dipped type. Those must’ve been fast sellers, because that’s the only kind we ever saw them make!

In recent years Dunkin’ Donuts has received a good bit of acclaim for their coffee. Long overdue and well-deserved, in my opinion, but of course I’m partial to the stuff. The lack of a mermaid on the coffee cups doesn’t bother me in the least.

Never convenient were these, but we did hit the Jack in the Box once in a while, and the food was decent. They did have a lot of appeal for kids, with cool giveaways and a “kid meal” that predated McDonald’s Happy Meals, if I remember right. And they made Rodney Allen Rippy a star, for a while at least. My apologies to those who can’t get the Jack in the Box jingle out of their heads as a result of reading this.

And the store is very sharp looking, no question about it. The Grand Prix in the foreground reminds me of my second car, a ‘76 GP bought in 1983. With my Pioneer stereo, Audiovox equalizer and Jensen Triax speakers, I could deafen whole blocks. Didn’t even need the Blaupunkt! Today I pretty much just run with whatever factory stereo comes with the cars, though.

One of the coolest aspects of this Pizza Hut for me personally is that the fact it dates from around the first time I ever ate at one. Almost exactly year after this photo was taken, our family - grandparents and aunt and uncle in tow, stopped for dinner at the Mt. Prospect Pizza Hut on Algonquin Road (like this one, long gone) after my eighth grade graduation ceremony in 1977. I don’t remember ever setting foot in one prior to that. I believe that restaurant had the newer logo (as on the folding sign to the lower right). Still like ‘em, although I’ll take a good old Italian mom-and-pop made pizza over any chain’s product every time.

The big news now is that Pizza Hut is floating the idea of simply calling their restaurants “The Hut”, just like Radio Shack is testing out “The Shack” as a new banner for their stores. (Don’t worry, I’ve resisted any temptation to start calling this site “The Blog”. But you’d know what I’m talking about if I did, right?......……………..Hello?)

My prediction, if Pizza Hut’s name change is successful, is that ten years from now we’ll just see the familiar red roof with the word “The” on it.

Another one I don’t have a great deal of personal experience with, but I do remember their TV commercials. Arthur Treacher’s was a division of National Fast Foods, who licensed the famous fish and chips recipe from the British family who created it in the 1860’s, the Malins-of-Bow. They chose distinguished British actor Arthur Treacher as their corporate pitchman (and as he got older, strictly their symbol – he passed away in 1975). Treacher was a distinguished character actor who was very active in the 30’s and 40’s, often playing a sage-like, quip-ready butler. One of his last roles was as the Constable in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins.

In the late 1960’s, Fisher Foods, parent of Fazio’s supermarkets in Ohio and Dominick’s Finer Foods in Chicago, bought a major interest in National Fast Food, gaining as part of the deal the franchising rights for Arthur Treacher’s in the Cleveland and Chicago markets.

Ah, the Ponderosa – my family ate Sunday dinner after church here for years on end. The Ponderosa chain was originally started as a knock-off of Bonanza, another steakhouse chain in which one of the original investors was a star of the famous Bonanza TV show - Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright. For many years now, both chains have been owned by the same company.

The one we went to was in Arlington Heights off of Golf Road (near Kmart), and looked very much like the Addison unit pictured here. You stood in a cafeteria- style line, got your tray with a little plastic number, picked out your side dishes and then ambled over to your seat (with a woodburned “P” on the seatback!), waiting for your steak to arrive on a black plastic and stainless steel plate. (Charles Hathaway, “Romleys” on Flickr, recounts a similar recent experience at a Bonanza restaurant, so obviously the drill hasn’t changed much. I probably haven’t eaten there since the mid-90’s.) Ribeye was my standing order, and was usually good, or at least not beyond “A.1. redemption”, an extreme but sometimes necessary measure. The one thing about Ponderosa that sticks out in my mind above all else is the fact that they charged for extra butter pats! I believe it was either six or twelve cents each, don’t really remember. The strange flipside of this was that Ponderosa was the very first restaurant that I ever remember giving free soft drink refills. Of course it’s now a constitutional right, but up until the early 1980’s (in my frame of reference at least –the Chicago area and the New England states), if you wanted another Coke at a restaurant you had to order a second one. At other restaurants, if the folks were in a good mood and my brother and I hadn’t committed any major infractions, e.g.: blowing straw wrappers in the waitress’s face, etc. (These were less enlightened times, friends.), they would spring for the second Coke. Then there were those rare-as-hen’s-teeth occasions where they would buy us a third one. Of course, my brother and I were thrilled, but all the while would give each other nervous “Have they gone nuts?” looks.

At any rate, that was the great “Ponderosa Paradox”, if you will – you got your fill of drinks, but if you needed any more butter pats, you’d best pony up, Pardner! As Hoss Cartwright would say, “There’s a mess of irony out there, Pa!”

Ok folks, this is it! This is the one. Woo-hoo! At this point (as you may have figured out), my objectivity goes straight out the window. Portillo’s is a Chicago-based chain of restaurants whose main specialties are incredible Vienna Beef hotdogs and classic style Italian Beef sandwiches, and I simply love the place.

From a single hot dog stand (it was actually a trailer) called “The Dog House” which opened in Villa Park in 1963, Dick Portillo’s restaurants had matured to sit-down units like the one pictured by the mid-70’s. Today, with 32 restaurants in the greater Chicago area, plus one in Buena Park and one in Moreno Valley, California, the Portillo’s units are a feast for the eyes as well – they tend to follow one of several themes - a 1920’s “boardwalk” theme , 1930’s gangster theme, 50’s, 60’s,etc.. Of course, many restaurant chains today are into retro artifact decor, with “leaf blowers glued to the wall” (as so aptly put on Dumpy Strip Malls, one of my new favorite sites) and the like, but Portillo’s artifacts are rarer, often larger, more plentiful and more interesting than I’ve seen anywhere else. (And the Niles Portillo’s, with the ‘30’s Prohibition theme, has two killer porcelain A&P signs hanging up – a must see.)

Another great thing about Portillo’s is that it alone provides a great reason to travel to Chicago. Seriously, if a local asks “What brings you here”, all you have to say is “Portillo’s”, and you don’t have to bother with any further explanations, such as: “Oh, I’m here for a conference”, “to visit family”, “to go to a Cubs game”, “to see the museums”, yeah yeah, whatever. Gotta plan my next trip!

Well, I guess that wraps it up, and there are still four songs to go on the Neil Diamond tape. Guess we’ll have to save “Cracklin’ Rosie” for another day (although that one’s almost worth sitting in the car another four minutes for, ice cream notwithstanding). Hope you’ve enjoyed this as much as I have!

Take Another Look - at Zayre!

(In our case, one last look at Zayre for the time being, with some nice photos from 1981.) Ah, the asterisk. Throughout history, nothing else has etched “Buy! Buy! Buy!” in the mind of the American consumer in quite the same way. Even today, its hypnotic pulling power is employed by a wide range of entities, from gargantuan retailers to well-loved retail fansites. And from the late 70’s through the end of its existence, the asterisk was Zayre’s calling card, with an association that endures even today. For a time, it actually helped.

By the mid-70’s Zayre, a billion-dollar company by that time, was in trouble. Profits were down sharply, stockholders were upset, and Zayre’s image with the buying public was a mess. The country was in the midst of a gloomy recession, which mortally wounded a number of discount retailers. More than a few of Zayre’s problems were self-inflicted, however, as company chairman Sumner Feldberg later admitted, with brutal candor, to the New York Times – “Our stores were not exciting and each did relatively little volume…attempting to stay alive, we squeezed the payroll and this created low operating standards for the stores”.

In a bid to reverse Zayre’s fortunes, the Feldberg family turned the company reins over to an outsider for the first time. In 1978, Maurice Segall, a Canadian-born vice president of the American Express Company and former executive of Steinberg’s, a large Quebec-based grocery/discount chain, was installed as Zayre’s president and CEO. Attracted by the prospect of a turnaround for the Zayre stores, but even more so by the potential of the fledgling T.J. Maxx chain, (a then 12-store Zayre subsidiary launched in 1976)and the 200 Hit or Miss stores, Segall jumped in and set about the task.

One of Segall’s most successful strategies was to strengthen Zayre’s presence in urban markets, which by 1983 contributed nearly 30% of the company’s sales and an astounding 60-plus percent of its profits. Already having a strong established urban base of Zayre-built stores, the company benefited from the flight of other chains from these areas, including one Chicago example cited by the Wall Street Journal, where Zayre took over a May Company-owned Venture store that had just posted a loss on $7 million in sales. After a year of operation as a Zayre, the same store was profitable on nearly double the sales. Smart merchandising played a major part, of course –the company scaled down its home repair and lawn mower departments, owing to the fact that many urban dwellers rent their homes. At the same time, Zayre significantly expanded its apparel offerings in these stores, providing a wide clothing selection for areas where store choices were often limited.

Segall’s master plan for Zayre included some relatively minor tweaking of the company’s geography, coupled with a major revamp of its store mix. Zayre pulled out of the St. Louis and Minneapolis markets altogether. The Warwick Shoppers Worlds, Bell/Nugents, and fabric stores were all disposed of. A major ramp-up of the Hit or Miss and T.J. Maxx store programs was launched, with the T.J. Maxx store count ballooning from 12 to nearly 170 units by 1985.

And of course, there was the “extreme makeover” of the Zayre stores themselves, a forty-million dollar revamp phased in over a four-year period beginning in 1978 (although it had been “previewed” on a couple of stores a year or so earlier). The orange-and-brown rainbow color scheme and the venerable asterisk would become familiar sights in communities (and in TV commercials) throughout all Zayre-dom. It was an outward sign of a new optimism at the now very profitable Zayre. For his efforts, Segall was awarded the chairman’s title as an addition to those he already held in November 1986.

Zayre’s “second golden age” proved to be short-lived, as the virtual bottom fell out in 1988. From a nearly $130 million operating profit the previous year, Zayre posted a disastrous $13.9 million loss. The late 70’s remodels were by now looking old. Zayre had become overly dependent on deep-discounted specials, to the point where customers spurned anything the chain sold at regular price. Most troubling were the apparel lines, where Zayre was losing ground rapidly to Kmart’s Jaclyn Smith line and also to Dayton-Hudson’s growing Target chain and their “Honors” line, an early example of that company’s affordable trendsetting prowess. In a May 1988 article outlining Zayre’s woes, the Wall Street Journal quoted a college student named Marie as she pointed at the Zayre store in Cambridge, Mass. “Look at it,” she said. “If my friends saw me coming out of a place like that, they’d never talk to me again”. Ouch.

By this time, it was clear to most that the real gem of the Zayre organization was the TJX Companies (T.J. Maxx), in which Zayre held an 80% percent stake, having sold a chunk of it to the public in 1987. Talk of a corporate breakup of Zayre began to circulate. It took a hostile takeover attempt by the infamous Haft family to actually bring it about. In August 1988, Herbert Haft announced his family’s intention to buy a major stake in Zayre. In the previous couple of years, the Hafts had made similar runs at Safeway and Stop and Shop, among others, and at the same time they pursued Zayre they had Kroger firmly in their sights as well. In each instance these companies were forced into a defensive position, with Safeway and Stop and Shop being taken private (Safeway later went public again and Stop and Shop would sell out to Royal Ahold) and Kroger forced to restructure. Although the Hafts never ended up controlling these firms, in most instances they walked away with a pile of cash, which was probably their intention in the first place. Zayre’s response was to break up the company. In mid-September, Zayre announced its sale of their discount (Zayre-branded) stores to Ames Department Stores Inc. of Rocky Hill, Connecticut, in a cash and stock transaction.

Ames’ purchase of Zayre made them the third largest discount chain behind Wal-Mart and Kmart, but it placed a tremendous strain on Ames, like “a guppie (sp) swallowing an Atlantic salmon”, to once again quote from the Journal. Ames closed 74 underperforming Zayre stores and (mildly) facelifted the remaining 315. Beyond the name change, which was applied to most but not all Zayre stores to mixed opinion, Ames failed to appeal to Zayre’s small but loyal band of customers in some important ways. They discontinued the Zayre credit card, through which 5.5% of Zayre sales had come, not an insignificant percentage. The tradition of keeping Zayre’s stores open 24 hours a day in the days leading up to Christmas was abandoned. Most importantly, Zayre’s “promotional” approach – special sales, mailed circulars, markdowns and TV ad blitzes was discarded in favor of Ames’ “everyday low price” approach. In April 1990, with the strain of the Zayre acquisition lumped in with the generally poor economy of their core New England market, Ames filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the first of two times they would do so. Two years later, Ames sued the advisers who promoted the Zayre transaction. In 2002, Ames closed their doors for good. The TJX Companies are still going strong.

Just for fun, here are a few Zayre commercials from their “renaissance period” - The “Take Another Look” campaign from 1978, a great 1980-ish Chicago Grand Opening ad featuring the fastest stockers in the world, and a Christmas ad from 1984. And here’s a link to a great post on Eddie’s Rail Fan Page, featuring a great night shot of a 60’s vintage Zayre revamped to the 1978 image, right down to the asterisk door handles! This empty parking lot shot brings back memories of driving home on late winter nights in my early 20's, pondering the great questions of life, like this bit of eighties profundity I read recently (can't remember where) - "Should I stay or rock the casbah?"

The Joys of Zayreshopping

No joke, “Zayreshopping” was an actual word coined by the company in 1975, the year these photos were taken. In their own words – “Zayreshopping is what we call the phenomenon we see so frequently: entire families shopping together in one of our stores. What makes it possible is that we have gathered together in one convenient location a broad diversity of merchandise assortments, ranging from fashion apparel to quality hardware, and from records and tapes to fabrics and yarn”.

The reality for Zayre (and for many other discount chains whose name didn’t begin with a “K”) was bleak at the time, but a major image revamp for Zayre was in the works and would launch the following year. These photos do a good job of showing the colorful hodgepodge (with a couple of ghostly superimposed models tossed in for good measure) that was Zayre in the early seventies.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go Walmartshopping.

Zayre, American Style

These photos were taken in 1971. Only two years removed from the sixties, that era in some ways seemed eons ago. If the early 70’s appeared slightly less turbulent on the surface, they really weren’t, what with the Kent State shootings, a ramp-up in the Vietnam War, and the first manifestations of the inflation problem afoot. America continued to undergo sweeping social changes as well, including some that filtered down to my isolated, suburban, grade school life. For one thing, our TV selection changed virtually overnight.

In 1971, CBS cancelled all of its beloved rural sitcoms and a number of its more “family-oriented” shows in one fell swoop – gone were The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D. (successor to The Andy Griffith Show), Family Affair, The Ed Sullivan Show and Hogan’s Heroes, among others. Granted, most of these shows were a long way from their peak, but they still drew respectable audiences. In their place would come new, more “ relevant” shows, pushing the new social hot buttons of the country – the initially controversial All in the Family (bigotry and the generation gap), its even more controversial spinoff Maude (women’s’ liberation), The Bob Newhart Show (sophisticated humor in an urban setting), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (a single, professional woman and her neurotic friends) and MASH (arguably a Vietnam War comedy/drama under the guise of a Korean War setting) among others. I liked ‘em all, and could still watch the cancelled stuff in reruns.

A favorite show of mine, when I could talk my folks into letting me stay up for it, was Love, American Style which ran on ABC from Fall 1969 to Spring 1974. It was an “anthology show” that usually featured three (fairly goofy) comedy/love stories in the space of an hour. Love, American Style never came close to the stature of the shows mentioned above, but it did offer a chance to see all your favorite former 1960’s stars back in action, albeit by now they had traded in the buttoned-down sixties look for flowered shirts, super-wide lapels and ties, mutton-chop sideburns and mini-skirts. The show captured the 70’s style like no other, in my opinion – it was almost like watching “That 70’s Show” in real-time.

Speaking of 70’s style, (I’m in desperate need of a segue at this point) these Zayre photos offer a healthy helping of just that. Zayre, celebrating its 15th year in 1971, was by that time 180 stores strong and still growing at a nice clip. The first five photos show one of the fifty Zayre stores that were equipped with gas stations at the time, including a nice close-up of a gas pump (with no dollar position, of course – that wouldn’t be needed for years) and some intriguing photos of a group of “Zayre-ettes”, for lack of a better word, descending on the gas station, apparently there to assist the customers with self-service fillups(?!). They’re dressed in impeccable style for the era, in clothes I can only assume didn’t come from Zayre. And those boots were definitely made for walkin’ (ok, that’s a 60’s expression). Not to be outdone, the ladies in the cashier booth are snazzed out in plaid mini-skirt outfits. Everyone’s in trademark Zayre black and red.

Below are some interior shots showing a bit more of Zayre’s “American Style”, with wonderful pseudo-Early American décor (dig that pediment signage) throughout. I particularly like the “Sportswear” department photo, as it shows a nice view of the sloped ceiling section at the front of the store, a standard feature of the early Zayre prototype. The last photo shows a phalanx of Zayre shopping carts at the front of the store, reverse-painted plastic handles gleaming. As Archie and Edith sang, “those were the days”!

The Zayre Family Album, 1971

With 10-plus years of successful growth under their belts, Zayre began to look at opportunities to bring some new retail formats under its corporate umbrella. Pictured above in a set of individual photos is the expanded “Zayre empire” as of late 1971. These additional banners each shared key attributes with the main Zayre operation, in product offering (fashions, fabrics, toys, general merchandise) and/or in geography (sharing Zayre’s primary New England trade area).

The first photo, of course, is of the “mother ship” itself. After an impressive five-year run, Zayre was coming off of a disappointing profit year, despite record revenues for 1970 of just under $600 million. At this time, Zayre had over 150 stores, covering nearly every major market east of the Mississippi River. The competitive onslaught of the behemoth Kmart chain was by now beginning to take its toll on the competition, though Zayre would prosper through it longer than most.

The second photo depicts a Shoppers City, one of four Minnesota stores that Zayre acquired in the winter of 1966/67 from Northern Enterprises Inc., of Duluth. Northern Enterprises’ primary business was (of all things) a bus company – the Duluth-Superior Transit Line, to be specific. A couple of years earlier, Northern had bought the retailer in a diversification move as its transit business flagged. The chain’s founders, Melvin Roth and Seymour Rothstein, were kept on to run Shoppers City, an arrangement that Zayre stayed with after their purchase of the chain. Zayre set the company up as a wholly-owned subsidiary called SC Trading Corp. For the first several years, Zayre operated these four stores under their original name, later co-branding them “Zayre Shoppers City” in the early 1970’s. A unique aspect (for Zayre) of these stores was their “family center” arrangement – general merchandise and a full supermarket under one roof.

The third photo shows what is probably the most familiar Zayre-owned nameplate behind Zayre itself and the still-to-come TJ Maxx. Hit or Miss was a chain of discount specialty stores aimed at the young womens’ apparel market. Hit or Miss was a division of Dedham, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Trading Company, and their first store opened in 1965 in Natick, Zayre’s home base at the time. When Zayre bought Commonwealth in late 1970, there were only 10 Hit or Miss stores. In the ensuing decades, the Hit or Miss chain would become a familiar fixture in shopping centers all over America, reaching a most impressive tally of nearly 600 stores by 1991. There were perennial problems, however, and an unfortunate number of management shakeups and new strategies were tried along the way. Hit or Miss ultimately outlasted Zayre as a retail brand, but not by long - spun off to its management in 1995, the last Hit or Miss stores sadly closed in 2001.

Photos four and five show the Bell Shops and Nugents womens' specialty stores, the Feldberg family’s original retail business. Reaching a peak of nearly 80 units in the 1950’s, the Bell Shops/Nugents operation was trimmed back through attrition as the stores’ leases expired. Settling on some 40-odd locations in the late 60’s, the stores were still struggling until a new strategy was put in place. Up to that point, the stores apparel offering was far too similar to that carried in the Zayre stores. A decision was made to establish a separate buying group charged with upgrading the Bell Shops/Nugents image with a higher grade of merchandise, sold at correspondingly higher prices. This would lead to the opening of some new Bell Shops/Nugents stores right next door to new Zayre units, which did surprisingly well.

The sixth photo shows a Beaconway Fabrics store. Boston-based Beaconway had been the fabric/sewing notions licensee for the Zayre stores, and also operated five stores under their own name in the Massachusetts region. In July 1968, Zayre bought out the Beaconway firm, keeping the individual fabric stores open.

Pictured in the seventh photo is Warwick Shoppers World, a discount chain based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island that Zayre acquired in June 1970. This company was founded by Edward Zwetchkenbaum and had 10 stores at the time of the Zayre buyout, operating under the names Warwick Shoppers World (Warren and Middletown, RI and Worcester and Bellingham, Mass, among others) and Coats Field Shoppers World (Pawtucket, RI and Brockton, Mass). There was also an apparel unit called the New York Lace Store. The stores were advertised as Warwick/Zayre stores. An interesting footnote in Warwick’s history was the tiny chain’s fight against the “Fair Trade Laws” (now-repealed laws that allowed manufacturers to set retail prices) in the late fifties and early sixties. The company made national headlines at the time as they were sued by such big names as General Electric and U.S. Time (Timex), among others, joining the fair trade battle alongside much larger retailers such as E.J. Korvette.

The last photo shows a Spree! store from one of Zayre’s most interesting ventures, a chain of discount toy stores launched in September 1970. The chain reached 13 units by October of the following year, when a 36,000 square foot Spree! store was opened in Enfield, Connecticut. The timing proved to be unfortunate as the Spree! rollout coincided with the meteoric rise of Toys “R” Us and stiff competition from Child World, among others. By 1976, there were only six Spree! units, and those would be gone by year’s end.

But in 1971, things looked different, of course. As the old saying goes, “Nice looking family!”