Welcome to Groceteria.com!
Established in 1999, Groceteria.com is a site about the history of American and Canadian urban chain supermarkets, from the 1920s through the present, with an emphasis on the physical structures and locations.
Places
The geography of chain grocery retailers in the U.S. and Canada since the 1920s.
This section is the bulk of the site and includes historical lists of chain grocery and supermarket locations from cities in all U.S. states and Canadian provinces. Many cities also have history timelines (more to come). These location lists not only chronicle the growth of supermarket chains but also urban spatial development in general. This is my primary area of research.
Chains
Capsule histories and related material about some North American supermarket chains.
This section includes photo galleries, links to resources, and a growing archive of material such as employee magazines, store maps, and other items. I am working to build this section into a better “portal” for information on chain history.
Message board
A place to discuss the history of supermarkets and other retailers.
About the site
More about the history of supermarkets, your humble host, and my methodology.
Latest Update
Just a quick update to mention that I have greatly expanded the Boston listings, taking them back to 1925, and adding Cambridge. I also was recently in Boston taking pictures and generally roaming about the city. I’ll get more of these photos added later, but you may have already seen a good chunk of them if you follow me on Twitter, which you should. I’m also actively tagging photos with the goal of getting a huge proportion of my collection online within the next year. More on that later.Boston and more
Disclaimers and Legal Stuff
Groceteria.com is a personal hobby site. It is neither affiliated with, authorized by, nor endorsed by any grocery retailer nor any other corporate entity.
Groceteria.com by David Gwynn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That basically means you can reuse my stuff (including data) for non-commercial purposes if you credit me. Photos are a mix of my own work and other images assumed to be in the public domain or used by permission.
