A Trip to the Jewel Grand Bazaar

It happened only once, so despite the passage of time it stands out in my memory. It was the night our family broke from the routine. The night we ventured out and tried something new. The night we threw our grocery-shopping inhibitions to the wind. It was The Night of the Jewel Roadtrip.

Sure, we had a Jewel Food Store right in the center of town. It was a late-fifties remodel, complete with the famous Jewel porcelain storefront and a quaint tin-tiled ceiling. We didn’t shop there often, however, because in the next town, some seven minutes away if you took your time, was a much larger, more modern Jewel-Osco food and drug combination store. With its far greater selection, most of our family’s food dollars (save for the occasional trip to Dominick’s) were spent there.

One fall evening, in 1977 to the best of my recollection, the folks told my brothers and I to load up into the car (a powder-blue Ford Torino station wagon – yes, we bought the dream), we were going grocery shopping at a new store near downtown Chicago (?!). To cut short the collective groan, they offered an explanation – this was a special store, different from what we were used to, with unique stuff and more of it. It was a “Super Jewel” or something like that. Suddenly, the prospect of getting out of studying on that school night finally registered – “Sounds really cool, Mom!”

So as night fell we drove, into the city, to the corner of 54th and Pulaski, whereupon we pulled into the fairly full parking lot of a large retail store. The familiar orange Jewel signage sported an unfamiliar name- “Jewel Grand Bazaar”. Wow! And different it was – sort of a combination of quasi-European Market Village (little mini-shops, faux Euro-decor with orange stripes everywhere) and sprawling warehouse (huge quantities of product in open-front wire cages). “Bazaar”, indeed!

Probably the most memorable aspect of that shopping experience (beside the store’s prime selection of Mad Magazine paperbacks, which was worth the long roundtrip in itself) was our first exposure to Jewel’s huge new “generic” product line, which at that time hadn’t been rolled out to the company’s entire store lineup yet. The generics were Jewel’s response to the economic travails of the late 70’s, when inflation seemed to reduce Americans’ purchasing power by the week. It was a “no-frills”, rock-bottom price product line, and it seemed to cover nearly every packaged food category imaginable. The traditional Jewel store brand names – Mary Dunbar, Bluebrook and Cherry Valley (long-standing house brands that were about to be phased out, replaced with a unified “Jewel” brand) , with their bright, colorful labels were tossed aside in favor of an austere look – plain white labels on uncoated paper stock and military style stenciled-look lettering. The only “decorative” element was a bi-colored stripe – black and olive drab. Now every suburban housewife could realize her dream – a pantry full of C-rations! Our family stocked up big time.

On September 27, 1973, the first Jewel Grand Bazaar store opened at 5320 South Pulaski Road in Chicago. At 90,000 square feet, the new store was nearly double the size of the typical Jewel-Osco store. The Grand Bazaar concept, more than two years in the making, “present(ed) new merchandising techniques to shoppers”, with “…wide use of palletized basket presentations in the customer shopping area”, as described in a Chicago Tribune article. As such, Jewel was one of the first major supermarket retailers to introduce the concept of buying in bulk. As mentioned, among the Bazaar’s most notable features were its “shops within the store”, including the Chef’s Kitchen (a name already in use by Jewel) prepared foods section, a bake shop, the “Pier 14” fresh seafood area, and the “Cheese Chalet” (later called the “Country Cheese Shop”), where quarter-ton blocks of Wisconsin Cheddar were routinely wheeled in, to be parceled off in small wedges for delighted customers.

The Grand Bazaars were loosely based on the Hypermarché (Hypermarket) concept, which gained significant popularity in Europe starting in the 1970’s. A typical European Hypermarket was a very big store, 200,000 square feet or more, offering a large selection of general merchandise and a full supermarket lineup, with many heavier-volume items sold in bulk. Influenced by this, Jewel had indeed begun development of a Hypermarket idea of its own at the time, although it never came to fruition. At 90,000 square feet and carrying a more limited selection of general merchandise, the Jewel-Osco Grand Bazaars at least qualified, according to Chicago Tribune business columnist George Lazarus, for the title “hypergrocery”. When you consider that many of the Grand Bazaars were coupled with a (Jewel-owned) Turn-Style discount store, they were at least close to the mark.

One pioneering aspect of the Grand Bazaars was the use of electronic checkstands, utilizing “20 electronic itemizing stations” with “four separate stations for payment”. Electronic cash registers were very much a new thing for Jewel (and anyone else fortunate enough to have them yet) in 1973, and it would be a couple more years before the UPC (Universal Product Code) system was fully in place. There were also “cart-to-car” pickup systems in the Bazaar stores, which was in one sense a holdover from a more service-oriented era. And in response to the growing “consumerist” movement of the day, each Bazaar featured a “Consumer Corner” staffed with its own full-time home economist, ready and willing to provide a sympathetic ear and sound advice. (“Well you know, I’ve had issues with shish kabob since high school…”)

Within six months of opening, the Pulaski Road Grand Bazaar was drawing 30,000 customers weekly and was projected to hit $20 million a year in sales according to Donald Perkins, Jewel’s highly-respected chairman, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune. The store’s Osco Drug unit, Perkins said, was the highest grossing in the Chicago area. The press weighed in favorably as well - Trib columnist George Lazarus pronounced the Grand Bazaars “an enormous success”, and mentioned that “according to sources”, Jewel had plans in place to have 12 to 15 Grand Bazaars operating at some point. Lazarus relayed an exciting finding of Jewel management – “The beautiful part of the Grand Bazaar story is that these stores aren’t taking much, if any, business away from other Jewel and Osco stores.”

Two additional Grand Bazaars opened in the summer of 1974, on 87th Street at the Dan Ryan Expressway and at the intersection of Grand and Kostner Avenues. Within the next few years, other Grand Bazaars would follow – 115th and Halsted, Rockford, Franklin Park and even in Milwaukee, a new Jewel market at the time, where the company wisely featured local favorite Meurer Bakery in place of their standard Bake Shop.

One of the grandest Grand Bazaar openings ended up being one of the last. In February 1977, the seventh Jewel Grand Bazaar opened up as part of the first phase of The Brickyard, a rare in-city mall project that received much laudatory press for that very fact. The rise, fall and hoped-for comeback of The Brickyard is well-documented on this recent Labelscar post.

By the end of the 1970’s, the Grand Bazaar concept seemed to just fade away. After 1978, Jewel’s annual reports are silent on the subject. One can assume that they took away certain lessons from the venture and just moved on – larger food/drug combination stores were the way to go, bulk bins of product, not so much. Several of the stores continued to operate for years with Grand Bazaar signage still in place, including the Franklin Park store where I shopped a number of times in the mid-80’s, but for all intents and purposes they were standard Jewel-Osco stores by then – no bulk bins, no cheese block, no home economist. The Rockford store was converted to a “Magna” no-frills warehouse store. Today, some of the stores live on as Jewel-Oscos, the Franklin Park unit being a nicely renovated example.

When I left the Chicago area in 1987, the “Generics” line was still available, although it had greatly diminished in popularity in those more prosperous times. At some point it was phased out, although a number of deep-discount grocery stores continue to stock plain-jane staple goods today. Though the economy of the last few years could arguably be compared to that of the late 70’s, generic products have not made a comeback in this age of brand power. The major chains have wisely taken the cue, ramping up their store brands’ quality and label-appeal, and everything I’ve read says that strategy is paying off handsomely. Now if they could only bring back those home economists…

The photos above are all 1970’s Jewel publicity shots, and the stylized Grand Bazaar font and “J” logo can be seen in several of them. The first photo, from 1974, shows the brand new Grand Bazaar at 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Photos 2 through 10 are all from the Brickyard Mall location, 1977. The camera and cosmetics department views show the typical interior design scheme of late 70’s/early 80’s Osco Drug stores. The black and white photo, from 1974, shows the Milwaukee location, with the Meurer Bakery featured prominently. Next is a 1975 aerial view of the Grand and Kostner store, with good neighbor Turn-Style to the right. The last two photos, from 1973, feature the very first Jewel Grand Bazaar at 54th and Pulaski, where some smart shoppers have selected giant boxes of Tide, "the washday miracle", a photogenic consumer product if there ever was one. This is the store that my family and I visited on that fateful evening described above.

Below, from 1977, is a close-up view of some of the Jewel Generics product line. You’ll notice that the ladies in the background have adopted “generic” facial expressions, in keeping with the spirit of things.

The Room With The Finast View

Here’s an idyllic view of the model 1957 kitchen. Everything is perfect - the gleaming, modern dishwasher, the sleek metal cabinetry and Formica, the diamond-pattern curtains – right down to the pink Telechron clock on the wall.

The table and counters are laden with the finest Finast foods – proud house brand of First National Stores, the late, great New England (and select other regions) supermarket chain. In later years the stores themselves would be emblazoned with the Finast name.

Now walk over to the sink, throw open the curtains, and lo, there it stands in plain sight – the distinguished edifice from whence these culinary treasures came.

“A mocked-up scene!” you insist.

Well, of course. But we can dream, can’t we?

Ralphs Granada Hills Reloaded, 1965

I think most people would agree that where movies are concerned, sequels are rarely better than the original. Oftentimes they aren’t nearly as good. They tend to do well at the box office, however, because they usually feature well-loved characters and/or tried-and-true themes. Once in a while, though, a sequel will rise above the norm by adding a new, exciting dimension to the familiar.

Perhaps this analogy can be applied to supermarkets. (Read this site enough, you'd think any analogy would, right?) The “original” in this case was a unit of the Ralphs Grocery Company, a major Southern California supermarket chain with 47 stores at the time, that opened in 1959 in Granada Hills, California. The “sequel” was a very significant remodeling of the store six years later. The store was featured on this post a year and a half back, and for our own “sequel” here, we’ve switched to color! (When all else fails.) These photos were taken circa June 1965 for a Progressive Grocer magazine article that appeared the following year.

From a retail history standpoint, it’s hard to envision a more exciting, dynamic time and place than Southern California in the 1960’s. This was the era of the California Dream, as extolled in the movies and pop music of the day, and people responded by moving there in droves, or so it seemed at least. To accommodate the transplanted throngs (to say nothing of the area’s impressive homegrown baby-boom output), new malls and shopping centers were opening at a rapid rate – well outpacing every other major market in the country. Among the hottest of SoCal retail hotspots was the San Fernando Valley, home in 1965 to a brand-spanking new mall, Topanga Plaza, and to the still shiny-and-new Fallbrook Center, along with a host of smaller strip shopping centers.

Continuing to do its part was the Ralphs supermarket in the Valley’s Granada Hills, its funky 60–foot tall sign standing proudly at the corner of Chatsworth and Balboa since the store’s 1959 opening. The sign and the building’s red and white diamond-patterned Arizona rock roof had stood the test of time – a bulwark for those (like the fine readers of this site) who valued good taste. The apple-hued interior, however, was definitely showing its age by this time. A major revamp was in order.

Ralphs’ management realized that a run-of-the-mill redo wouldn’t cut it, as noted in the Progressive Grocer article - “...we were faced with a fiendishly competitive situation (in Granada Hills). On three sides of our unit there, and within a two-block area, are big shopping centers, each with a super market exerting the fullest pressure on the trading area.” It was determined that this particular remodeling would have to be something special. On top of that, Ralphs would use the Granada Hills makeover as an opportunity to address a longstanding problem.

“Surveys show that the woman shopping in the super market is often a woman totally confused”, said Ralphs’ general manager. (Lots of responses to that comment are reeling through my head at this point. I think that’s where they’ll stay.) “Yet the same woman who retraces her steps back and forth across our stores seeking out merchandising owes her confusion not to a lack of wit on her part…” (Uh-oh.) “…but to a lack of logic on ours.” (Whew! Glad you put that in context there, my friend.) “She may feel that vanilla extract might surely be located by going to the flour gondola – how is she to know that it is with spices strung out over one of the freezers – or in a separate spice cabinet of its own on the end of table 14? She has little logic to guide her, only memory, and all stores lay out their dry groceries according to their own ideas – and those ideas are constantly changing.” (Let’s try to stay away from the thin ice there, guy. Ok?)

And so was born the “shop-at-a-glance” concept. In essence, the standard supermarket layout was scrapped in favor of “family groupings” – or “centers”, to use Ralphs’ terminology. The “Breakfast Center”, for example, featured cereals, juices and coffee, three categories of product that are normally found in very different locations. “Like shopping in your own kitchen!”, Ralphs’ ads proclaimed. (Provided one kept the cereals, juices and coffee in the same location.) The traditional perimeter departments – meats, dairy and produce – remained in those locations. The “centers” were identified by large, colorful three or four-sided signs hung above their respective areas. To give customers a clear line of sight around the store, the shelving units, known as “gondolas” in the business, were cut down to a maximum height of 5 feet, which also had the curious effect of reducing inventory capacity by as much as 25% in some departments - not a minor issue.

The store’s “grand reopening” took place over three days in early June 1965, with ads proclaiming the specially-crafted promotional tagline: “America’s First Completely Departmentalized Supermarket!” That claim is debatable, of course – Grand Union, for example, had been experimenting with departmentalized merchandising formulas for a good ten years by then, most notably in their East Paterson, New Jersey flagship store. Perhaps it was the first of its kind on the West Coast, however.

Beyond the new layout itself, a big part of the remodeled Granada Hills store’s appeal was its striking new decor. The colorful, classy new look was the work of Brand-Worth and Associates, a Los Angeles-based firm that specialized in retail interior design. The new and remodeled Ralphs supermarkets of the 1960’s were among the most elegant of the era (Or any previous era, in my opinion. Or any subsequent one.), largely owing to Brand-Worth’s stunning designs and meticulous attention to detail.

For the departmental signs, they developed a set of cartoon drawings to be used as identifiers “without a line of copy, not a word”–the frozen foods section, for example, featured an Eskimo. Interestingly, the colors Brand-Worth used for these signs actually corresponded to the “color wheel” – in sequence! (I love 50’s and 60’s advertising psychology!)The meat, dairy and liquor departments featured colorful, wonderfully stylized cutout signs, again with unmistakable symbols in lieu of text. In this respect, Ralphs was definitely ahead of its time. There was one exception to this – the store directory sign above the checkout area, but even this featured the added twist of color coding.

As appropriate as their company moniker sounded, “Brand-Worth” was actually a conjunction of its owners’ last names, Bill Brand and Freddie Worth, who founded the firm in 1954. Among their clients were The May Co. (the gourmet food sections of May’s Southern California department stores were a precursor to Brand-Worth’s work for Ralphs), and regional department store chains such as Phoenix-based Goldwater’s and Omaha’s Brandeis.

Undoubtedly the new decor was a hit, but history is silent (i.e.: I couldn’t find any more articles) as to whether or not the Granada Hills store’s new departmentalized layout was a success. I’d have to think that in the grand scheme of things, it probably wasn’t. One thing is evident – it didn’t end up starting a trend. The average supermarket of today is laid out pretty much like those of fifty years ago – standard end-of-aisle signs, and nothing but lighting overhead.

Which is to say “totally confusing”, I guess!

The photos are pretty much self-explanatory (just follow the symbols on the overhead signs!), but a couple of things are worth pointing out – in the produce department, note the sombrero-ed Fred Flintstone, star of TV’s first prime-time animated cartoon show, standing guard over the cantaloupes. One would have to have been there in the early and mid-1960’s to appreciate the huge cultural phenomenon the Flintstones were at the time, a fact that has been largely forgotten. In those years they were everywhere, and not only on “kids stuff” - lunch boxes, clothes, a syndicated comic strip and all manner of toys and games – but in commercials (Welch’s Grape Juice, Alka-Seltzer and *gulp* Winston Cigarettes), unusual store appearances (a woman costumed as Wilma Flintstone, handing out promotional brochures at the downtown Chicago Wieboldt’s department store), and occasional references on other popular TV shows of the day. A few months after this photo was taken, “The Flintstones” would begin its sixth and final prime-time season on ABC, later showing up on local TV stations, then cable, and finally on DVD.

Lastly, notice the cartons of cigarettes in the liquor department and near the checkstands. It’s a sharp contrast to today, when cigarettes are almost handled like a controlled substance. At that time they were more or less treated like any other product, except for the age restriction, of course. Well into the 1980’s, individual cigarette packs were routinely displayed at each checkout lane, within easy reach, right next to the Rolaids and Dentyne. In the 60’s and early 70’s, things were even more lax, to the point that in some instances parents, if so inclined, could send their grade-school aged children to the store to buy cigarettes with a note: “Dear (insert name of complicit supermarket) Checkout Lady: Please sell Rocco two packs of Marlboros. Thank you. Signed, Rocco’s Dad”

Thankfully that doesn’t happen anymore. But then, neither does sending one’s kids alone to the supermarket.

A Truly Scintillating Publix

"1. The neon pylon and background wipe on and silhouette the letters."

"2. When the wipe on is complete, the letters scintillate."

"3. Then the neon wipes off, leaving only the scintillating letters.
Scintillating letters go out and the cycle repeats."

Yup, born too late.

This is the Publix Super Market at Britton Plaza, 3838 Dale Mabry Road in Tampa, Florida, as depicted in a 1959 ad for Time-O-Matic, Inc., the manufacturer of the control system that enabled this little bit of neon magic.

Thanks to Debra Jane for the tip on the existence of this ad.

I'll Be All In Clover...

…and when they look you over,

I’ll be the proudest fellow in the Easter Parade. *

The “softer side of Sears” is very much in evidence here, many years before they adopted that as an advertising slogan. These photos, from Display World magazine, depict two of Sears’ 1961 Easter Season window displays as they appeared at the company’s larger stores (called class “A” units internally), which by 1961 were mostly opening up in malls or major shopping centers. At that time, of course, Sears continued to operate a large number of downtown and free-standing suburban stores as well.

It’s easy to see why Sears enjoyed such a strong reputation for affordable fashion in those days. The elegant, pastel clothing and the high quality of the window displays would have been perfectly appropriate for an upscale department store, in my opinion.

Note that the mannequins are all wearing black shoes, wisely avoiding the deadly faux pas of wearing white ones before Memorial Day. My grandmother would approve.

Hope you have a very nice Easter!

*With apologies to Irving Berlin.