Mrs. Chicago Shows Jewel The Way!

“What changes would you make, Mrs. Chicago – if you had your way? What is your idea of a perfect food store?” asked Jewel of Chicago’s homemakers, seeking ideas on how to transform their recently acquired , middling chain of former Loblaw stores into a grocery shoppers’ nirvana.

18,389 women answered the call.

And Jewel responded.

The greatest thing about this May 1934 full page ad, beyond the cute (if now politically incorrect) premise, snappy ad copy and illustrations is the presence of a complete listing of Jewel Food Stores in existence at the time, 87 in number. This was two years into the chain’s ownership by Jewel, by which time they were off to a solid start on their way to Chicago grocery market dominance.

This should serve as a reliable guide for Chicago-based retail archaeologists looking to track down the earliest history of Jewel. Just for fun, I typed in six or seven of the addresses into Windows Live Local, and several times a building turned up that could have easily dated from the early 1930’s or before, a very heartening sign.

Happy hunting, Jewel fans!

Postwar Jewel, 1947

Throughout the 1940’s, Jewel Tea Company’s experience was similar to that of several other successful regional grocery firms. Like many other companies both within and outside of the retail food industry, Jewel did its part for the war effort. The company “got into war work” – producing rations for the U.S. Quartermaster Corps.

And like many of their counterparts, Jewel experienced minimal growth during the War Years – (1941 to 1945), followed by slow, steady growth in the second half of the decade. Material shortages, which really didn’t ease until the end of the decade, held the construction of new stores to a slow pace. Also, the entire industry was impacted by the “excess profits tax”, which subjected profits above a certain level to an additional tax of 80% or more. This continued until the early 1950’s.

In the 1950’s and 60’s, Jewel (and again, many of their fellow industry travelers) would more than make up for these setbacks, expanding furiously, with greatly improved profitability.

The forties were a pivotal decade for Jewel in many ways. While it lagged behind the Route Division in throughout the 1930’s, by 1942 the Food Stores division accounted for 60 percent of Jewel’s sales. This percentage would rise during the height of the war (1943-44), fall back slightly in the years immediately following the war, and then rise irreversibly from that point on.
This was the first full decade for the “Jewel Retirement Estates”, originally established in 1938 as one of the very first employee profit-sharing programs in American business, an initiative which garnered Jewel praise from many quarters. Another step, which in time would also enhance Jewel’s public image was the appointment of 36-year old Franklin J. Lunding as company president in 1942.

Lunding was possessed of a highly developed sensitivity toward both Jewel employees and customers, expanding the retirement program and adding a host of other benefits, including scholarships and insurance, which were by no means standard perks at the time. In 1951, Lunding would pen a best-selling book “Sharing a Business”, in which he passed on Jewel’s successful methods of management, with a heavy emphasis on giving managers decision making input. Lunding would go on to become Jewel’s chairman, and in 1960 would take on the additional responsibility of chairman of the Chicago branch of the Federal Reserve Board.

The photo montage above dates from 1947, and shows Jewel’s two main marketing approaches, a route truck and a “modern food market” surrounding a dainty cup of coffee. Jewel would sell the ground equivalent of 1,700,000,000 cups of coffee that year. The photo below shows Jewel’s three house brands for canned goods – Bluebrook, Mary Dunbar and Cherry Valley, names that graced Jewel shelves until the late 1970’s when they were sidelined in favor of a unified “Jewel” private label brand. Mary Dunbar was the maiden name of Jewel’s first “spokeswoman”, and was used generically by the company for many years afterward. From the 30’s thought the 50’s, tens of thousands of Mary Dunbar recipe books found their way into American kitchens.

Speaking of “war work”, here’s a great pic from Dave Mewhinney’s great Electric Railroads picture pages showing a Jewel store on Clark St., south of Diversey and Broadway, and another near the intersection of Madison St. and Austin Blvd.

Inside a Jewel Food Store, 1944

Here are a couple of interior views of a Jewel store from late 1944. It’s hard to describe what I like most about these wonderful scenes – The orange collars on the employees’ white uniforms, standard for Jewel at the time. The bright, bold graphics of the 1940’s packaging. The gleaming porcelain refrigeration cases. The simple elegance of the light fixtures. The natural beauty of the vegetable displays. The Jewel script logo (which I really miss) on the wall poster. The simple Christmas decorations, including real pine garland, something you’d never see in a commercial location today. The well-worn wooden floors...

Chicago's Little Jewel

Jewel Tea Company, as it was known from its inception in 1899 until 1966, had a national reputation as a home delivery service long before it became established as the dominant Chicago grocery chain. The company was founded in 1899 with a rented horse and wagon by Iowa native Frank Skiff, who two years later would be joined in partnership by his brother-in-law, Frank Ross. Starting with a single Chicago route, sales of coffee (always the bedrock of the business) and other food items – mainly tea, spices and soap products were $11,000 in 1901, the first year of the partnership.

Jewel grew rapidly, to the point that they opened their own manufacturing plant in Chicago in 1909, in order to accommodate the growing demand for their private label foods and cleaning products. By 1910, sales had grown to a million dollars annually, and 100 routes were in operation. By 1915, sales had surpassed the $8 million mark and 850 routes were established, remarkable by any standard.

One of the keys to Jewel’s growth was the company’s practice of giving away premiums to their customers in order to help ensure their loyalty. Some of the premiums, for example, were giveaway lithographs featuring engraved, idyllic scenes in the Currier and Ives mold. These lithographs did much to stimulate the sales of Jewel’s soap flakes, a harder sell than one would think in those days when many families made their own soap from animal fats and such (yeesh, shades of Granny Clampett!). The most common premium approach, however, usually consisted of a coupon included in a package of coffee or tea which customers could save and redeem for a piece of Haviland China. For years Haviland would enjoy a very successful partnership with Jewel. (Later the company would partner with East Liverpool, Ohio-based Hall China, manufacturers of the famous Jewel “Autumn Leaf” pattern, a wildly popular series with collectors today. As John Wright points out in his Marketing History of the Jewel Tea Company, “(Jewel’s) coffee sales spiraled even at company prices of twenty-five cents a pound at a time when grocery stores only charged seventeen cents”.

Frank Ross was responsible for one of history’s most successful marketing devices, one which would pay dividends for Jewel Tea and a good number of other companies through the years – the advanced premium. Now a Jewel salesman would offer a homemaker an entire set of Haviland China up front – her family would have use of the wonderful new dishes right away. All she had to do was buy a certain number of Jewel products over an agreed period of time. Customers appreciated the trust, and Jewel’s sales exploded. More than any other factor, the advanced premium placed Jewel atop the industry.

A major milestone was reached in March, 1916 when Jewel Tea Company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Fueled by their success, Skiff and Ross set out on an ambitious expansion drive to double the amount of service routes, adding distant regions of the country to the company’s operating area, whereas previous growth had always been contiguous to their existing territory, radiating from Chicago. Events would prove the drive to be a bit too ambitious in light of the onset of World War I, with its attendant shortage of raw material and other problems. In 1919, by which time both Skiff and Ross had stepped aside, the company incurred its first loss, ($1.6 million) and new president John S. Hancock took the reins.

The new team took steps to turn Jewel around, one of which was trimming low volume or unprofitable routes, ending up with some 1,000 routes by 1921 from a previous high of over 1,600. The cutbacks helped restore Jewel’s financial health, and over the next 10 years Jewel would regrow the route business, albeit at a much more conservative rate of 50-60 new routes a year.

In June, 1929 Jewel began construction of a magnificent headquarters complex in Barrington, Illinois, 32 miles northwest of Chicago, in what then could only be loosely called a suburb. “Jewel Park”, as it was called, would be the new home of the company’s headquarters and would also host their coffee roasting operation, turning out the company’s signature product in vast quantities.

In 1932, a new law was passed in the tiny community of Green River, Wyoming, which would have at least a partial hand in shaping the destiny of Jewel Tea. The law, which came to be known as the “Green River Ordinance”, forbade uninvited solicitors, striking at the very heart of Jewel’s livelihood, driving home the necessity to Jewel management of diversifying the business. Also, the company, now fully recovered from its earlier travails, found itself at this point with a large surplus of cash and a critical need to put the money to good use. The perfect vehicle was about to come their way.

On March 14, 1932, The Wall Street Journal announced that the Jewel Tea Company had purchased 77 Chicago-area grocery stores from Loblaw Groceterias, Inc., a Canadian firm (which is still a familiar name to Canadian shoppers, by the way) which was seeking to trim back its operations during the darkest economic hour of the 1930’s. At the same time, Jewel bought out four stores from the Middle West Grocery Co., about which I’m pretty sure next to nothing is known today. So out of the box, Jewel entered the market with 81 stores.

Pictured above are three 1930’s Jewel Food Stores with an average of probably 5 to 7,000 square feet, very much in keeping with other chain grocers of that era. Oftentimes the stores occupied the first floor of a much older building. As Jewel upgraded from the Loblaw properties, more and more of the stores had the porcelain glazed brick facades. The location of the first two stores is unknown; the third features a pocket-sized Jewel (next to a pocket-sized Woolworth’s) in Des Plaines, a Northwest Chicago suburb. Below, in a nod to Jewel’s original home-service business, are some 1940's photos featuring Jewel’s lineup of home delivery products.

Thanks For Tuning In!

…and welcome to all of those who are visiting from fark.com, where I’ve noticed this site is featured today! The Kmart posts are below (just scroll down) and on the next page. Hope that you enjoy these looks at our well-dressed retail past. A number of discount store and supermarket chains have been featured (plus a lot of stuff about Sears) up to now, and they can be searched by chain and in some cases by city on the lower right side of the page. If your favorite chain isn't on here yet, hopefully it will be soon.

The scene above is from a G.C. Murphy store in 1968, where a finely outfitted family is about to drop some serious disposable income on a new RCA Color TV. The family’s first color set, I’d be willing to bet.

Hope you enjoy it and thanks very much again!