Sarnia, ON chain grocery/supermarket history, 1924-2018
Posted: 05 Sep 2018 21:16
Great news, everyone! I spent a few hours in Sarnia today, both visiting and researching the city. I got a little something out of it:
Sarnia, ON chain grocery/supermarket history, 1924-2018
As it turns out, Sarnia was a far easier city to research than London. The local public library had copies of city directories back to the turn of the century in paper form, so I didn't need to wrestle with microfilm. All of Sarnia's 1970s to 1990s directories were also published by Polk, not Vernon, so I didn't have to cope with the chronically-missing classified listings for which Vernon's Ontario directories are known.
Its grocery history is also on the interesting side. Unsurprisingly, Dominion was the first chain to enter Sarnia, doing so in the first half of the 1920s. Loblaws and A&P emerged in the following decade. Unlike in US cities, though, A&P never blanketed Sarnia with small neighbourhood stores...and both A&P and Loblaws sufficed with a single Sarnia store apiece until the 1960s. A local player called M&P topped the other chains in store count in the 1930s, but didn't survive the 1940s. Another local name, Walker Bros., had a retail presence from the 1930s to the 1960s, and was listed both as a grocer and as a department store.
There were also surprises. The biggest of these was that Dominion appeared to exit Sarnia entirely through the duration of the 1940s: No Dominion stores are listed in either the 1941 or 1945 directories (even in the alphabetical section), and when the chain re-emerged in 1952, it was in a location different from the one it had operated from more than a decade earlier. Loblaws also exited the market under their own name in the late 1980s, later re-emerging under the Valu-Mart, Zehrs, and Real Canadian Superstore brands.
Sarnia, ON chain grocery/supermarket history, 1924-2018
As it turns out, Sarnia was a far easier city to research than London. The local public library had copies of city directories back to the turn of the century in paper form, so I didn't need to wrestle with microfilm. All of Sarnia's 1970s to 1990s directories were also published by Polk, not Vernon, so I didn't have to cope with the chronically-missing classified listings for which Vernon's Ontario directories are known.
Its grocery history is also on the interesting side. Unsurprisingly, Dominion was the first chain to enter Sarnia, doing so in the first half of the 1920s. Loblaws and A&P emerged in the following decade. Unlike in US cities, though, A&P never blanketed Sarnia with small neighbourhood stores...and both A&P and Loblaws sufficed with a single Sarnia store apiece until the 1960s. A local player called M&P topped the other chains in store count in the 1930s, but didn't survive the 1940s. Another local name, Walker Bros., had a retail presence from the 1930s to the 1960s, and was listed both as a grocer and as a department store.
There were also surprises. The biggest of these was that Dominion appeared to exit Sarnia entirely through the duration of the 1940s: No Dominion stores are listed in either the 1941 or 1945 directories (even in the alphabetical section), and when the chain re-emerged in 1952, it was in a location different from the one it had operated from more than a decade earlier. Loblaws also exited the market under their own name in the late 1980s, later re-emerging under the Valu-Mart, Zehrs, and Real Canadian Superstore brands.