Groceteria.com

The vertical blue signs with white lettering signs continued at least through the 50s. The earlier version of the oval logo dates from the early 60s, but it usually didn't replace the vertical signs. At 16K sf, this store could be anywhere from mid-50s to late 60s.

The store looks more mid-60s. The white lettering with blue piping and the corrugated metal background were common among Kroger stores in that era. In the mid- to late 50s, they favored neon on letters that usually were painted blue or red. In a shopping center, the walkway most often would have bee...

From the 30s (the dawn of shopping centers) until well into the 60s, multiple groceries were the norm. Early, pre-WWII plazas like the Connecticut Avenue Park & Shop in DC (Safeway and A&P) and Forest Hills Plaza (Fisher & A&P) in East Cleveland, Ohio had multiple supers. The large s...

Bulk foods came several years after generics. They may have been a late response to the stagflation of the Carter, and early Reagan years, although many of the items like the dried fruit and yogurt covered raisins and nuts were artifacts of their time rather than popular, well-loved items that peopl...

Revco bought many small and medium sized chains in the Southeast during the 70s. They often did a very poor job of integrating them. I remember gloomy, poorly stocked stores in Nashville, when I lived there in the 80s--stores Revco had bought from a couple different chains and never upgrade--in Nash...

I have an interest in history & architecture. When I was a kid, it was the boomer years and my mother was a stay at home mom for whom shopping was a necessity and a bit of a sport and a social thing--she went to different stores for different purposes and had long-time friendships with some of t...

White Cross is a co-op and has been around since the 60s or 70s. It's not very big and it doesn't operate everywhere. They probably include stores that never use the White Cross name to survive. Upthread--the Gray Drug in Florida was the Cleveland-based chain. They'd been there since the 50s or 60s ...

Part of my earlier post was cutoff. Re: Hook's & SuperX; Kroger bought Hook a short time (1-2 years) before selling off the combined operations. This was partly to shore up SuperX's patchy coverage. Re: C-Stores. In many places those didn't really proliferate until the late 60s. The first genera...

combined operation. SuperX tended to have patchy coverage, because the stores tended to be next door to where ever Kroger built stores in the 60s or in old Kroger stores, that were replaced by super stores or greenhouses. In places like Cincinnati, where Kroger had invested heavily, they had good co...

Soda fountains date back to the 20s and were largely gone by the early-to mid-70s. the last one I saw was at a Thrift Drug in Southern Ohio in '72 or '73. I've heard that People's still had a few in DC until a little later than that. Prohibition may have been a factor, given the 20s, but also the li...

Big Star still exists. There are listings for stores in Memphis if you do a Google, but no website. They had a store Greenwood, MS when I was there for a work project a few years ago.

Drug Fair was acquired by Gray Drug of Cleveland (which was owned by Sherwin-Williams) in the 70s and then the whole operation was bought by Rite-Aid in the 80s. Gray operated discount stores for many years and their drug stores tended to sell a little bit of everything, which was pretty common unti...

Yes--all the generics worked this way. "Scotch Buy" was around (on a small number of items" into the 90s, along side all the usual safeway brands. They seemed to phase it out around the time they brought in "Safeway Select". The generics were okay for canned goods and other ...

Peaches had fairly large stores. The one near me was in a late 50s Kroger--probably 15,000 sf. Another was even larger and occupied a large chunk of an old Federal's Department Store.

In their closing days, the A&Ps were neat and clean, and devoid of customers. The perishables weren't great, but the same could be said of their main competitors, Kroger, Winn-Dixie, & Cub. At that time, Kroger was rolling out its card and had adopted high/low pricing. A&P could have tri...