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.

The Safeway in Winter

Here’s a nice winter scene for early January – the brand new Leadville, Colorado Safeway, which opened in December 1971, is shown here in a photo taken soon afterward. There’s plentiful snow on the peaks – both the majestic Rocky Mountains in the background and the store’s own peak – the shallow, sloped roof that became one of Safeway’s stalwart designs in the early 1970’s. A simple design, but certainly very attractive in this context.

Happy New Year!

…and welcome as we begin a new year of Pleasant Family Shopping, where we take a look at and discuss America’s great chain store history – old discount stores, supermarkets, and maybe even the occasional department or specialty store thrown in just for grins! Illustrated in artistic black-and-white, lifelike natural color and (wherever possible) super-saturated color, as in the photo above!

A young woman (dressed appropriately for grocery shopping, I might add) peruses the cereal aisle in this Weyerhaeuser packaging promotional photo from a 1960 McGraw Hill advertising text. I would date the actual photo itself back to 1957, based upon the cereal box designs and the expert guidance of Dan Goodsell’s Cereal Box Archive on his wildly entertaining Tick Tock Toys/Imaginary World website. And wow, 17 cents for a box of Corn Flakes!

They say that you can tell a lot about someone from what they buy, so let’s take a look, eh? Let’s see…Medosweet milk, which would locate this scene probably in the Washington state area…a Kellogg’s cereal “Variety Pak”…(Costs more this way, but hey – everyone’s happy)…umpteen packages of Jello…(There must’ve been a federal mandatory minimum Jello purchase in those days)…a Flintstones-sized steak…(There’ll be some hearty eatin’ tonight!)…a two-pound box of Nabisco Premium saltines…(Never seen one of those before, guess the fam must be into soup!)…eggs, celery and egg noodles…(Rounding out the food groups - sure was easier in those pre-pyramid days when there were only four)…a carton of Chesterfields…(Who needs filters? Besides, Perry Como smokes ‘em! On his show!)…a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon…(Obviously a family of taste)…and let’s not forget the box of Tide, “The Washday Miracle”…(Definitely among the most photogenic of consumer products). So there you have it – a thrifty homemaker eager to please her Pabst drinkin’, Chesterfield smokin’, Red-meat eatin’ family!