Groceteria.com

This week, I spent a day in Lindsay, Ontario. This table is so small and incomplete that it would scarcely qualify as a site feature...but nevertheless, here it is: Lindsay, Ontario chain grocery/supermarket locations, 1925-2018. So...what is Lindsay? It's a small community of 20,000, an hour north ...

I'll file it under "probable former independent grocer." There used to be a lot more of those in southern Ontario than there are now.

FYI, there are references lingering in the back corners of the web to a "Joe's No Frills" store once existing at this address.

Could this store have been Loblaws originally? It scarcely looks like anything that company would have built. Zehrs? The plot thickens...

Excellent! Well, almost excellent: Google Maps misplaced four of the Leonard Street addresses west of Walker in the middle of nowhere. Not sure why it did that...

Yet another mystery from today's weekend drive: aylmer.jpg This building is a smidgen larger than the one in Ingersoll . The entrance configuration looks supermarket-like, but there's no guarantee that this started out as a supermarket: It could have been built as a variety store or hardware store i...

ingersoll.png Here's something I stumbled upon today. What might this have been? (And don't say "Dollar Tree.") The building's on the small side...less than 10,000 square feet, but plausible for a 1940s or early 1950s supermarket. The side buttresses are also suggestive of that era, and t...

Thanks for sharing! The Safeway pylon/barrel roof at 1305 S. Kansas Ave. is a gem. There's another mid-century Safeway on 1301 SW Gage Blvd: It's not quite as aesthetically attractive, but the shopping centre sign is a sight to behold. I wonder if any post-1963 Marina stores exist in Topeka? The A&a...

Moving over from northwest Indiana to western Michigan... Grand Rapids, Michigan chain grocery/supermarket locations, 1925-1960. Grand Rapids is the second-largest city in Michigan. Even so, with 371 chain grocery locations on the chart, this project turned out to be much larger than I expected it t...

Notes and highlights: * As with Chicago and Waukeagn, Kroger expanded to Gary through the purchase of the Chicagoland Consumers chain. Confusingly however, there were actually two "Consumers" chains operating in the early 1930s: Consumers Sanitary Coffee & Butter (the one bought by Kro...

Thought I was done with Indiana? Not quite. Gary, IN chain grocery/supermarket locations, 1925-1960 This city was interesting to research...as well as depressing. I took the liberty of adding a "disposition" column, and the statistics are staggering: 71% of the locations listed in this tab...

FWIW, I confirmed in the street guide that the Piggly Wiggly listed at 1000 N. Lewis (residential address) was actually just where I thought it might be: at 1600 N. Lewis. That's a pretty common misprint in city directories. The building at that address seems a little too big, but it also seems a l...

It's interesting that Loblaws was operating in Halifax as Valu-Mart in the 1970s and as No Frills in the early 1980s, in spite of never operating in the city under its own name! At least for the Valu-Marts, they started off as "Save-Easy," which is a name that first appeared in Halifax by ...

Plunging right into the middle of downstate Illinois: Bloomington/Normal, IL chain grocery/supermarket locations, 1926-1960. At risk of living up to their stereotypes, Bloomington and Normal are...well, very "normal" places to research. There are no wholesale street renamings or renumberin...

When I researched the grocery history of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois (I'll be posting it soon), I discovered that Eisner originated as an operator of Piggly Wiggly stores. The stores weren't actually branded as Eisner until the late 1950s, which is when Jewel bought the chain. Their central office ...

Here's something interesting I discovered today in rural Middlesex Centre, Ontario: A store still branded as Food Town. You'll notice that the logo here is a take-off of that of Canadian Foodland, which is also owned by Sobeys.