Groceteria.com

More updates. This article from 1970 lists Shop-Easy as one of the 60 discrete companies then owned by George Weston Ltd...which links the chain to Loblaws. (Geez, is there a single Canadian grocery brand of the last 50 years that Loblaws, Sobeys, or Metro don't control?) Furthermore, the Loblaws Fr...

I really ought to read my own damn posts. In the Kansas City thread a couple years ago, I discovered... There is a crown jewel in Kansas City from this era: 4019 E. 31st St. This store boasts original brickwork, an intact pylon, and some glorious MSM zig-zagging over the windows on the west side (th...

Can anyone figure out the function of that stack of three boxy devices at the front of the store, at the far left of the photo? (It's reminiscent of a Brancusi sculpture.) I think the stack is actually two boxes (the bottommost "box" is a reflection on the floor). Maybe it's something sim...

Not much new to share on London. My efforts to trace the history of store locations were put on hold in 2019 when I moved out of the city. However, I just caught wind that the Miracle Food Mart-cum-Food Basics store at 1297 Oxford Street E underwent a severe renovation in 2020, completely obliterati...

What is this architectural style? It has a cupola with a weather vane on the roof. Could this store building have been constructed for Safeway, perhaps in the 1920s or '30s? This looks to be a variation of the typical design that Safeway built through most of its trade area in the late '30s and '40...

The 1940s Safeway at 818 Main Street in Chico looks pretty nice! And it now houses a natural foods co-op. I think it's in good hands.

The Spanish tile roof was not uncommon on Safeway stores in California at the same time (at least in SF), but I don't really remember seeing the configuration with the towers, either. The SF stores I can think of only had one or two less steep rows of tile: Hmm, interesting! The San Francisco store...

Brief update, after checking the most obvious resources for leads: Google Street View proves that the building is a former supermarket, and it operated as a Shop-Easy store as late as 2009. Shop-Easy is a chain name that came up during my Thunder Bay research, and I *thought* it had gone totally def...

Any ideas on the original purpose and identity of this one? The shallow pitched roof with exposed beam-ends is similar to that of the gable stores that Safeway was opening in Winnipeg around 1960...but the scale is not. The footprint of the building is only around 8000-9000 square feet. Note the sna...

Morgantown WV 1974 Moutaineer Mall, 93,393 5000 Greenbag Road Sigh...I lived in Morgantown, WV in the 2000s. The Mountaineer Mall went from "critically ill" to "dead as a doornail" during my time there, and Montgomery Ward's closure probably did more than anything else to set th...

While perusing the archives of the Winnipeg Tribune for store opening dates and such, I happened upon a photo of a Safeway store interior taken in 1976. Of course, my eye was immediately drawn to the graphic on the wall behind: Do these wonderful 1960s "abstract food" wall graphics still e...

Ever since I took my Labour Day Winnipeg trip , I've been completely infatuated by the built history of Safeway. And that infatuation extends back to the earliest moments of the chain: When Safeway entered Canada in 1929 and 1930, the vast majority of the stores that they opened were newly-built str...

I've greatly expanded the Safeway section on my own (completely static, HTTP-only, stuck-in-the-mud, mobile-be-damned) website with dozens of new (grainy, low-resolution, unhotlinkable) images from my travels to the River City. (Yes, I've been feeling very cranky about technology.) If you do ever go...

*sigh* I resolved that I'd take a break from this thread, but I'm eating my words because I found a massive lead that I had to share. The entire archive of the Winnipeg Tribune from 1890 to 1980 is freely accessible online from University of Manitoba Libraries. I've been using the archive to double-...

One more photo before I put the brakes on this vacation picture show: This is 110 Sherbrook St. in Winnipeg. If I'm not mistaken, this building is the first Safeway store in Canada . Winnipeg was almost certainly Safeway's first Canadian market, and the company was headquartered there. Christian Cas...