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Me and the A&P

I've always been fascinated by the A&P. It represented the "old chain store" where I grew up, and I remember you could always smell the coffee in an A&P store.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, established in New York in 1859, has long been synonymous with grocery retailing in the United States, along with Safeway and Kroger to a lesser extent. Even now that the chain is limited to questionable market share in a few regions (and operating under many different names), people still think of the A&P as the nation's supermarket.

At its peak, A&P covered the whole country, although its reach was limited in "Safeway country" out west. North Carolina was strong territory for the company, and by the time I was born in 1964, there were several stores in Greensboro, my hometown, many of them in already outdated urban locations. I was fascinated by these stores even as a child.

My mom generally didn't like to shop at the A&P.. There stores were, she believed, dirty and expensive. She was probably right; cash flow problems and high prices ultimately destroyed much of the A&P empire. Many of the A&P stores were also located close to downtown, which was a rather frightening part of town for my parents at the time.

All the same, I occasionally convinced her to take me to the old store on Commerce Place. She'd shopped there as a child with her grandmother who lived next door (in the house which was torn down to build the bus station). This branch had opened in the early 1940s as one of Greensboro's first supermarkets, and it seemed ancient to me in the early 1970's, with its old-fashioned meat cases and produce displays. And it did seem a little dark and dirty, now that I think about it.

On these trips downtown, which my patient mom graciously endured, we also looked at the old department stores, already in the process of moving to the suburbs, and she showed me the stray floor tiles in a paved parking lot which were all that remained of a 1937 Big Star, Greensboro's first real supermarket. I was obsessed with old grocery stores even at the age of nine.

There were a few other A&P stores downtown, which we visited to get my great grandmother's favorite snuff (Railroad Mills Sweet). I liked them too, but the one on Commerce was my favorite. Oddly enough, it turns out that two of my other favorites from those years had once been A&P stores as well, including this one on Walker Avenue. We also had one of the A&P colonial-facade stores, which are perhaps the archetype most closely associated with the chain.

As an adult, I shopped at the A&P in Charlotte and Myrtle Beach a few times, but I found them to be a little expensive too (if not as dirty as my mom found them). By the 1990s, they'd pretty much disappeared in most of North Carolina, although I did visit one in Myrtle Beach about a year ago. You could still smell the coffee.