Groceteria.com Message Board

(sorry guys if this in the wrong forum.....i think this is the right forum for this)

Where else in the world is there two supermarkets in the same shopping center.

Here in California, you'd have to go to the city of Beaumont to find this.

In the 1970's, a shopping center opened on the corner of Highland Springs Ave and 6th St that featured a Stater Brothers and a Kmart. They lived together in harmony until the 1990's.

This is when Kmart moved to the other side of the freeway to join a new Albertsons market.

A year or two later, Food 4 Less moved into the old Kmart store. Therefore, you could choose the Food 4 Less or Stater Brothers. This scenario still exists today! Its been 12 years and both are still going strong. The F4L has a 20 year lease:

Really Long Link

The F4L has been remodeled recently. It looked like a 70's Kmart when it first opened, and I havent been in that area in years (till the other day when I drove by it from Phoenix)
Does this happen anywhere else.

There are a ton of shopping centers with two supermarkets.

The first modern shopping center in Richmond, Cary Court, opened in the 1930's with an A&P and a Sanitary (later Safeway) next door to each other in the strip of shops.

Although it's not as common as it once was, there's a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Richmond that's in the same center and next door to a Kroger.

In North Las Vegas, there is a shopping center with a Wal-Mart S/C and a VONS with a Rite Aid (even though that's not a grocery store).

The most prominent example in Sacramento is at South Hills Center in the Land Park neighborhood, where a late-1950s wavy awning Safeway and a funky wavy-awning Farmer's opened near each other; the Safeway did not last into the late 1960s (and currently is a post office), but the Farmer's continues on today as a supermarket (as Vic's IGA).

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Chris Sampang
http://dtcwrt.earlracing.com/stores/ - NorCal Stores

As of a few years ago, Greenville, SC had a shopping center with a Bi-Lo and a Fresh Market about 2 doors down. Granted, in this case, the two stores really serve different niches.

In Columbus, GA, there was a shopping center with both an A&P and Winn Dixie. The Winn-Dixie location eventually became an independent, then finally closed about a year before the A&P. Both were located at far opposite ends of the strip. They've since been torn down and replaced with a Books a Million and a Publix.

I always found that pairing odd, since both stores catered toward similar people.

I do know that many times a grocer will have an exclusivity clause written into their lease - meaning that another grocer can't move into a shopping center that's already occupied by a grocer. The Wal-Mart Supercenter co-exisitng with the VONS surprises me.

That's true, but consider that what to the naked eye appears to be one shopping center may be subdivided into several parcels with different ownership. Nowadays, this is common, but usually there are cross-covenants and restrictions among all of the parcels to make sure the center operates as a whole rather than an amalgamation of different properties.

With the Wal-Mart SC/Kroger in Richmond that are next door to each other the Wal-Mart was enlarged to SC proportions, but it is evident that there weren't any exclusivity clauses in place to protect Kroger.

Focusing this toward history (please), the practice of two supermarkets in one shopping center was extremely common until the early 1970s in most of the country, albeit less so on the west coast than in the south and midwest.

In fact, it was almost a standard practice for anything above the smallest neighborhood centers in some areas through the 1950s and 1960s to have two supermarket anchors.

Using NC as an example, Charlotte had the following:

-- Park Road Shopping Center: A&P and Colonial
-- Freedom Village: Harris Teeter and Colonial
-- Eastway Center: Winn-Dixie and Colonial

In Greensboro:

-- Golden Gate: A&P and Kroger (in fact, these two anchors are still there as Food Lion and Harris Teeter)
-- Friendly Center: Colonial and Winn-Dixie

In Winston-Salem:

-- Parkway Plaza: Kroger and Food Fair
-- Northside: Colonial and A&P
-- Sherwood Plaza: Food Fair and A&P
-- Thruway: Food Fair and Winn-Dixie

In High Point:

-- College Village: Kroger and Colonial

Again, the trend moved toward one supermarket per center by the early 1970s, perhaps due to larger stores or maybe increased involvement by individual chains in the development process.

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Groceteria.com

At Valley Plaza in North Hollywood there's a Smart & Final (edit: NOT a former Thriftimart, see below) near a Ralphs (former Hughes). This shopping center is featured in the book "City Center to Regional Mall" and it says that Valley Plaza was actually 2 shopping centers that were developed by two rival developers. There was also a grocery store, I believe a Mayfair, that is now the movie theater just south of Victory. I've loaned out my copy of the book so I don't recall whether the Thrifitmart and Hughes were developed by the same developer. The current Smart & Final is a replacement store built in the last few years.
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2& ... ne=3167673
(Edit: upon further review, the Hughes opened as a McDaniels' Market. It was destroyed in a fire in 1977 and rebuilt, though it was already Hughes by then. The S&F site was originally a Big Owl combination market and drug store. It wasn't a Thriftimart and the current structure is a new build in the last 10 years or so.)

In Woodland Hills, CA, at the corner of Topanga Canyon and Ventura there is a Ralphs almost immediately adjacent to a Vons. I couldn't find any articles in the Times archive about the construction or history of this center so I can't explain why this is the case.
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2& ... ne=6776076

I'm looking at that part of the book now, and the 1949 site plan shows them as part of the same development. I think the other center was more confined to the environs of May Co. store building.

There were three supermarkets (Ralphs, Mayfair, and Jim Dandy) in the plan for the Westchester business district/shopping center on Sepulveda near LAX. Also on the west coast, Seattle's Northgate, Fresno's Manchester Center, and Bakersfield's Hillcrest (Niles Avenue) featured two supermarkets each at one point. So it wasn't unheard of even west of the Rockies.

Baker and Funaro's "Shopping Centers" (1951), which has been referenced here before, features several two supermarket plans from around the country. And there are numerous examples in my 1964 shopping center guide.

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Groceteria.com

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 strips that were built in the 50s usually had 2, sometimes 3 super markets, as well as multiple variety chains (Woolworth & Kresge wer in most of the early ones in the Midwest), and multiple drug store chains. Even small strips sometimes had multiple supermarkets. What happened later?---malls, which usually relegated super markets to outparcels, "conveneience wings, etc. That trend started with large purpose built, enclosed malls. In Cleveland, the early examples were Severance Center (1963/64) and Richmond Mall (1966). The strip malls that were built from the mid-60s onward were smaller than their 50s counterparts, and often served as secondaries to regional malls. At some point, it was discovered that food shopping was part of the "journey to work" and malls became even more fashion oriented, so super markets became unwelcome and even more divorced from mall areas. They stayed in small strips and were designed to be a more local draw. Variety stores which grew in size during the mall era and were gone from strips. Drug stores disappeared about the time that super markets did and they wound up in small strips, or as part of a super market.

The early plazas evolved from "street car" strips, the larger of which (at major intersections) usually had a couple grociers, one or more drug stores, a florist, a barber, sometimes a dime store, etc. Small strips would just have a grocery and a few other stores. Think of the medium to large 50s/60s era strips as big steetcar strips (the earliest 30s & 40s ones were just that, with a small parking lot in front, instead of a sidewalk, and often bigger parking in back). The more contemporary strip malls probably are more like small streetcar strips; they serve ares with relatively little density and having a competitor nearby is less of an asset.
The new lifestyle and power centers often have a supermarket, but typically just one and they tend to be more aimed upscale shoppers.

This Smart and Final was never a Thiriftimart. The S & F opened about 10 years ago. If memory serves me correctly it replaced an auto parts store but not 100% sure about what it was before S&F.

Yeah, I realized that after I posted it. Thriftimart had a couple of locations in North Hollywood but they were on Lankershim and not Laurel Canyon. I put an edit at the bottom that when it opened it was a Big Owl combination grocery/drug store. A bit to the north was a Thrifty, and next to it was McDaniel's grocery. So not only did you have two grocery stores but two drug stores in the same center.

(There was an auto parts store in that part of the shopping center which was a Trak Auto and then Kragen. It's now located along Victory in a store that was previously a thrift store. it's hard to tell what it what anymore since a large chunk of the shopping center was torn down to build a new middle school.)

North Utica Shopping Center in Utica, NY in the early '70's had an Acme in the middle and a Loblaws on one end. Today, that same center is home to a Price Chopper. Also interesting to note that at the same time, there was a stand alone Super Saver (another American Stores' banner) on down NY State Route 5 just outside or just in city limits. Either way there couldn't have been a distance of 2 miles between this store and the Acme.

I could SWEAR I already posted this...

Green Acres Plaza in Saginaw, MI had two supermarkets from its opening in 1960 until about 1993. At one end, next to endcap anchor WT Grant, was A&P, and Food Fair was at the other end, towards JCPenney (the other endcap). This plaza also had Federals Department Store and SS Kresge, and later a theater was added next to Penney's.

Food Fair was converted to Giantway (Bay City, MI chain) sometime in the 1980s, and then closed in 1993. A&P expanded in to the former Grant's sometime after Grant's closed; this store operated as A&P until the 1990s when it was rebranded as Farmer Jack. Since then, it has closed. Federals, Kresge, and JCPenney are long gone too - Federals was cut up for smaller stores; Kresge became McCrory and then Big Lots (it's now vacant); Giantway became Fashion Bug (one of the few holdouts); and Penney's was AJ Wright from 2000 until January of this year. The theaters had converted to Hancock Fabrics, which is also closed.

Thanks Jeff~

As I have driven by that site off the 10...I have always have wondered what the deal was!

In San Bernardino, at the corner of Waterman & 40th...a Stater Brothers and Alpha Beta were in the same center. Story I was told was that the Alpha Beta was vacated, then burned to the ground. Site/land sat vacant for years.

With LUCKY (now Albertsons) across the street, I guess during the Alpha Beta/LUCKY "situation"...Staters acquired the land, and built a replacement store on the site. The former Staters is still vacant. 99 Cent Only Stores has tried to move in...yet Staters owns the building, and would rather have it vacant than have 99 there.