I haven’t been chatty lately, but I have added new stuff over the past couple of months.

New location lists:

BIG updates:

I’m especially excited about the Toronto updates. This was a major expansion helped along by access I now have to a lot more digitized material that has allowed me to fill in a good number of franchise and other gaps. Toronto is one of my “adopted hometowns” and is one of the places I want to give a special focus to, so there will be more to come. I’ll be adding more photos and also expanding the timeline.

Sorry. I haven’t been doing much exploring of my own lately, although I have completed a very nice paper on the validity of paid placement search engine results and also an annotated bibliography on historical document digitization projects in the past few weeks, just in case anyone cares. But I’m planning on getting away this weekend, so there’s no telling what I might come back with (or where I might go).

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Above photo courtesy of Mike in New Jersey.

The photo above shows the remains of an A&P on Mt. Prospect Avenue in Newark. It’s still selling groceries probably seventy years after A&P moved in, so the location was obviously pretty good. The sign was evidently of pretty high quality as well.

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Above photo courtesy of Jess Cliffe, Vintage Seattle.

Recently spotted online:

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Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether or not this Pavilions unit in Seal Beach might have originally been a Safeway-Super S combo? It has a matching Sav-on drug store next door and the whole thing really looks like it was originally meant as one integrated building. Either way, I’m pretty sure the Pavilions was originally a Safeway store.

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Via a link in the message board, I found yet another useful searchable image archive, this one from Seattle. The cool Albertsons photo above came from it.

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Also found a set of really nice images from a 1952 Grand Union in Patterson NJ at some Library of Congress site for which I’ve misplaced the URL.

For those of you who are address and date nuts, you may be excited to see that I added this list of all 1973 locations to the Alpha Beta section today. It’s interesting stuff and I did a little limited cross-checking o see how many stores in Southern California were still operating as Ralphs locations, and how many in Northern California had lasted long enough to become Albertsons branches.