This interesting snippet from a 1968 Colonial Stores grand opening ad from Atlanta comes to me from Robby Delius. It’s particularly noteworthy because it makes such use of the “Big Star” motif that would ultimately be applied to all Colonial Stores by the mid-1970s.
Also from 1968 (and from the same source) is this grand opening ad for a Safeway store in Richmond. There’s nothing really remarkable about this one, I guess. It’s just, as the ad says, really ultra-modern. And the cartoon shoppers look so darned happy…
More reader submissions to come.
The map in the Colonial ad indicates this store was located in Decatur, GA on Commerce Ave. near the cemetary. Not sure what occupied the building from the time Colonial/Big Star closed until HarrisTeeter built a new store on the site when it tried to enter the Atlanta market. I wished they hadn’t left. I shopped at the 2 story Sage Hill location until it closed and appreciated the competition with Kroger and Publix. Like Sage Hill, this is now a Kroger.
The map definitely looks like the Commerce Avenue location, but the actual location noted in the text is Columbia Drive. However, the current building on Commerce was erected in 1968, per property tax records so this must be it. There’s a post on this site’s message board that suggests it was an A&P prior to being a Harris-Teeter, so my guess is that it ultimately became one of the Big Star locations that was sold to A&P in the early 1990s. HT would have drastically remodeled it and it’s interesting that the interior still has the HT decor package, with no remodeling by Kroger (I was just there last week).
A little more research suggests that Commerce Avenue was originally called Columbia Drive, so there you go…