KMart grocery stores before SuperKMart

[danielh_512]

SuperTarget is all run by Supervalu in the food areas, which would lead me to suspect that Archer Farms/Market Pantry merchandise is the same as Flavorite/Richfood brand merchandise sold at Supervalu chains here in the Mid-Atlantic.

David's right on Gold Circle acquiring Richway (When I moved to NC in 1988, Target had just bought them). I also remember Gold Triangle in NC, which I believe was the same store as Gold Circle. Gold Circle was all over, they had stores in Cincinnati (not sure what happened to these), Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Cleveland (which went to Kmart and Hills, depending on the locations).

It should be added that the May company while having Venture, also bought Caldor in the 1980's (Northeastern chain that was spun off, and then folded in 2000). They acquired Caldor through their acquisition of Associated Dry Goods in the mid-80's, which got them Lord & Taylor and some other stores that I can't remember, but aren't relevant here.

I have a vague memory of what was a former Kmart Foods in Altoona, PA that operated as a Shop N Save, and the aisles I remember were not parallel to the front of the store (as many Giant Eagle stores in the Pittsburgh area are). This operated as a Shop N Save until about 1992, when the Kmart remodeled, and expanded into the former food space, creating one of the largest regular Kmarts around.

Something of note: Not all small food spaces next to Kmart stores were Kmart Foods. Grand Union had a contract to build these stores with Kmart in the greater Washington area, probably because of the strong union ties in Washington (which still exist today) that kept non-union Kmart from opening their food operations. AFAIK though, the rest of these spaces on Kmarts built before 1972 (when the Kmart Food plan folded) were Kmart Foods at one time or another.

A previous post mentioned Zayre Foods. What do you know about them? While fairly familiar with Zayre, I had never heard of them having any food operations, at least with their Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic stores that I am familiar with.

[Edric Floyd]

I remember the KMart on Oakland Park Blvd in the Ft. Lauderdale area had a K-Mart Foods store in the early 1970's. Also there were two K-Marts that had Pantry Pride Supermarkets attached, also in the early 1970s. They were located in Margate on State Road 7 and in Pompano Beach at US1 & Copans Road. All three of these stores had a passage way between the two sides and were later walled off completely.

The Oakand Park store's food side closed sometime in the late 70's and operated briefly with an independant, then as a Party supply store. Last time I passed that store, the K-mart was still open (now as a BIG K) and it appeared to include the entire building. I dont remember any other K-Mart food combos in South Florida where I grew up.

The Margate and Pompano Beach stores are the same style as the Bradlee's/Food Fair combos in the North east circa 1960's/1970's. And Pantry Pride/Food Fair was a dominant chain in South Florida well into the late 70's.

The Pantry Pride stores began to disappear in the early 1980's so the Margate K-Mart grocery store remained vacant while the K-Mart remained open for another decade. There was a Winn-Dixie location at the other end of the Margate Shopping center, first as Winn-Dixie's "Table Supply" warehouse type supermarket in the mid 1980's and later as a Winn Dixie Marketplace. And that closed in the early 1990's. Now, the Margate K-Mart and the former grocery next to it are demolished, as is the Winn-Dixie at the other end of the center. There is a Wal-Mart Supercenter there now.

The Pompano Beach K-Mart/Grocery combo would change from a Pantry Pride in the 1970's to a SUN Market (renaming of several Pantry Pride stores in the 1980's) and the grocery closed by the early 1990's. The grocery side was demolished and a Movie Theatre was built in the late 1990's. The K-Mart remains to this day and my sister worked there for two years until this past November.

Another K-Mart location with a supermarket attached that I know still exists is in Albany Georgia. It is an older K-Mart on Dawson Road and the Supermarket space is that of an local chain in Georgia called Harvey's.

I don't know the history of this location but it appears that the Harveys has been operating there for a very long time.

Previously in Macon, Georgia, there were K-Marts with Piggly Wiggly stores attached. One on Riverside Drive that closed in the mid 1980's and was demolished after being flooded in 1994. The other was on Pio Nono Avenue. The grocery side is now an Office Depot. The K-Mart side is a furnature store. The Pio Nono location may have also been a Kroger sometime in the 1970s before a "greenhouse" Kroger was built further west.

K-Mart had re-located their Pio Nono Av store to a newly built "BigK" about a mile west in 1997! That store was large enough to be a Super Kmart, but for some reason they chose to not make this large store a Super K. And this was at least 3 years before the FIRST Wal-Mart Supercenter opened in Macon. K-mart could have easily gained the upper hand against the small old Wal-Marts in this town. In 2000 Wal-Mart built replaced their two old stores with THREE supercenters around Macon and the "Big K" closed as part of the bankruptcy closings. The BigK without a grocery did not last 5 years!

[Steve Landry]

Great stuff Edric :)

There were notable numbers of Kmart/Kmart Foods in Miami. One I remember well was on Coral Way (24 St.) and Galloway (87 Av.). The food part was run by Allied Foods. This 4 corner area and surrounding neighborhood was called Westchester. Grocery stores occuppied 3 separate corners. Publix and Kmart Foods in one corner, Food Fair/Pantry Pride on the next and Kwik Chek/Winn Dixie on the last.

Also remember that many KMart/Pantry Prides were J.M. Fields/Food Fairs. KMart was the biggest buyer of J.M. Fields when Food Fair disposed of them.

Side note: Do you remember the Grand Union/Grand Way combos??

[Dave]

...
Side note: Do you remember the Grand Union/Grand Way combos??

There were a couple of Kmart/Big Star pairs in Richmond after Grand Union bought the Big Star name as part of the Colonial Stores deal. Later, the Big Stars (not all) became Winn-Dixies. Now they are nothing.

[danielh_512]

Harvey's, mentioned earlier in Georgia, is owned by Delhaize, and has been a name branded on some Food Lion stores in Georgia. The name was local, but is now being switched back & forth w/Food Lion in many areas.

[Edric Floyd]

Also remember that many KMart/Pantry Prides were J.M. Fields/Food Fairs. KMart was the biggest buyer of J.M. Fields when Food Fair disposed of them.

Side note: Do you remember the Grand Union/Grand Way combos??

Steve,

Thanks for the info on the K-Mart/Pantry Prides. I forgot the name J.M Fields and I could easily confuse that with the old J Byron's (aka: Jackson Byron or Byrons), which had nothing to do with supermarkets, but my mother frequented those stores as well.

I was in elementary school when I remember the stores as K-Marts. And since the building style was so different from other K-Mart stores, I always assumed they were something else until this year when I found a site online that had photos of JM Fields/Bradlee's combos with Pantry Pride/Food Fair.

I don't personally remember any GrandWay stores. However I do remember many Grand Union Supermarkets in South Florida. Some shared shopping centers with ZAYRE stores and many were free standing.

All of the Grand Union stores were gone from South Florida by the mid 1980's. The two that were in Boca Raton were Hyde Park Foods (the name that replaced many Pantry Prides in Florida) and eventually replaced with Publix. And appearances look as if Publix demolished the old store and built new. Another Grand Union store in Pompano Beach (Sample Road) sat empty for decades and is now a Save-A-Lot store.

[Edric Floyd]

Harvey's, mentioned earlier in Georgia, is owned by Delhaize, and has been a name branded on some Food Lion stores in Georgia. The name was local, but is now being switched back & forth w/Food Lion in many areas.

Harvey's has a history in South Georgia of setting up in older supermarket buildings abandoned by other chains. In the late 1990's they took over many Piggly Wiggly locations when their owner (then Bruno's) began converting all of their stores to the FoodMax brand and closed several Piggly Wiggly locations, effectively removing the Piggly Wiggly name from the area except for a few Piggly Wiggly independents

Harvey's was family owned until Delhaize (Food Lion) bought them out in recent years. Slowly, the Food Lion stores mostly in small towns were converted to Harveys. This usually happens around the same time a Wal-Mart Supercenter comes to town. One former Food Lion location that sat vacant for over a decade was reopened as a Harvey's in the summer of 2005 (Cochran, GA) The Food Lion store in Gray, GA was closed and remains vacant.

There are still FOUR Food Lion stores in the Macon/Warner Robins area. These stores were originally 24 hour locations but now have reduced operating hours and compete with larger (24hr) Kroger and Wal-Mart supercenters.

Joe Harvey, the founder of the Harvey's chain died a couple of months ago.

Side note: Ahold buys Bruno's (Piggly Wiggly/FoodMax), then Southern Family Markets buys Bruno's(FoodMax) from Ahold in 05' and Southern converts ALL FoodMax stores back to Piggly Wiggly or Southern Family Foods in towns that have an independantly owned Piggly Wiggly. Their big promotion: "The pig is back!" Also, Southern Family Foods may take some recently vacated Winn-Dixies

[rich]

Colonial operated a small number of stores under the "Zayre Foods" banner. More commonly, they had Albers, Colonial, or Big Star stores in shopping centers with Zayre.

[sflagrocer]

In the late 60's til mid 70's Allied Supermarkets ran K-Mart Foods as a separarte operation than K-Mart in South Florida, locations that I can verify would be Sunrise Blvd & 441, Lauderhill; Oakland Parl Blvd & NE 6th Ave, Oakland Park; Washington Ave & 441, Hollywood; NE 107th St & Biscayne Blvd(US #1) North Miami; and a Location in West Palm Beach I can't recall the address, nor the K-Mart Foods that was mentioned at Coral Way & Galloway in Miami. K-Mart Foods in South Florida was a discount food operation that was fairly sucessful for a short period of time, but was eventually doomed due to lack of buying power (5 or 6 stores, indepent supplier Hills Brothers and later Malone & Hyde) and high labor costs(union shop in a right to work state). K-Mart Foods concept was cutting edge at the time as was a shorter lived competitor Tresurey which also was a 70's Super Shopping Store, but niether could consoledate department store shopping with grocery shopping, much as today we struggle to combine Cafe sales with traditional grocery store sales.

[u-save]

Once again a bit off, but I recall seeing a photo of a pre-supermarket style LS Ayres grocery store in downtown Cincinnati, 1920's vintage, in a book about Cincy history.

Also read an article that suggested that had Federated kept Gold Circle, Richway, etc. they would be today's Walmart.

Yeah But Federated was too much under pressure from shareholders to deliver profitability and to focus more on the upscale department stores like Bloomingdale's, Burdines, etc. Fed. was too diversified in too many
retail segments to keep Gold Circle and Richway running profitably let alone growing , but if it had sold all of its specialty stores and concentrated on simply the upscale dept stores and Gold Circle/ Richway, it could have been a juggernaut that could match Target.

BTW Target bought Richway and Hill's (discount stores purchased by Ames in '98) bought Gold Circle.

[rrr]

So why did Dayton-Hudson succeed with Target? Just less competitors in the upper Midwest where Target started? Or better management? As an aside, it sure seems like Federated is not trying too hard with the old Dayton-Hudson stores, even less than May was, not that they ever really got started.

[danielh_512]

U-save, that's not entirely true. Not all Hills stores in Ohio (mainly only in NE Ohio) were converted to Hills. Kmart acquired some. Gold Circle operated in Charlotte, and those stores were acquired by Target.

[Groceteria]

Interesting thing I discovered while researching my upcoming section on Charlotte NC. For a few months in 1976, most of the Kmart Foods locations in Charlotte were rebranded as Wrigley stores, with new signs and everything. This was done by Allied Supermarkets, apparently to distingush the ownership of these stores from the adjacent Kmarts. I think Allied also owned the Wrigley stores in the Detroit area and just happened to have this name handy (and maybe even some reusable signs).

The stores closed for good in late 1976, and were eventually taken over by Bi-Lo as part of its entrance into the Charlotte market.

Did this Wrigley shift happen anywhere else?



Photo from Charlotte Observer, 8 May 1976.

[rich]

Wrigley was their main brand. This was a little after they consolidated their banners in Detroit (where they also operated Packer stores), although they kept operating as K-Mart foods until the end of the decade. In Detroit, they merged with Great Scott! a year later and went to format that included S&H green stamps (they'd dropped their own Gold Bell stamps a few years before).

[Groceteria]

Discussion moved from different forum:

Wasn't KMart's first grocery project a joint venture with Allied?

Early Kmart stores had attached grocery departments called Kmart Foods, some (but not all) of which were operated by Allied. It was apparently more of a "leased department" arrangemet than a joint venture per se.

My recollection is that it was more of a licensing/joint development thing. To use the "K-Mart Foods" name, the operators couldn't give trading stamps or use other promotions common to conventional supermarkets. Essentially, they had to complement the "discount" format of K-Mart.

From the early/mid- 70s onward, K-Mart seemed to simply build new stores that sometimes had a supermarket next door (often there was just a K-Mart). For example, they co-developed sites with A&P in various parts of Ohio (the ones in Cleveland had trading stamps for awhile, which would not have been permitted under "K-Mart Foods" rules).

At some point the "K-Mart Foods" licensees switched to the owner's dominant names: the National Tea stores in Indiana became Del Farm (which National used as a "discount" banner in some places). I think all of Allied's Michigan bannners (Wrigley, Packer, K-Mart) were consolidated under the Great Scott name when they acquired Great Scott, which I think was in the late 70s. They closed or sold the K-Mart stores that were outside of the main Detroit-based market area around 1980: Foodtown took over some in Toledo under its "Kash & Karry" warehouse banner and the ones in Cleveland wound up with a variety of other uses.