Groceteria.com

Hi all. Through my own error when I was clearing out a very off-topic post, this whole thread was accidentally trashed. It was pretty much the digital equivalent of ""my finger slipped" and it's the first time it's happened. My sincerest apologies.

David

Dave wrote:I've found that North Carolina usually seems to be omitted from the list of states where Lucky operated Memcos and Gemcos.

The ones in the Triad opened late in 1980, and were only open for about two to three years.

Dave wrote:Golden Skillet fried chicken got its start as a takeout counter at Thalhimers Westmoreland.

Funny you should mention that, because I'd meant to include the strange little Golden Skillet counter within the Friendly Center Thalhimer's in Greensboro in my earlier post.

The flagship Belk store in Charlotte's SouthPark Mall had an independently-operated cafeteria on its second floor until the 1990s. I believe the downtown Charlotte store also had one and it may have also had a snack bar/grill. Meyer's (unit of Allied Stores) in downtown Greensboro NC had two restaur...

-- Greensboro NC (High Point Road): became a Hechinger and now a furnuture outlet.
-- Winston-Salem NC (North Point Boulevard): now some sort of postal facility.

<<Changed the subject line to open this to all Memco store locations.>>

In some recent research, I uncovered that every Kmart in Greensboro NC through about 1980 was considered to be part of a "Kmart Plaza", from the standalone 1967 store with an attached Kmart Foods, to a 1976 strip center with a few other adjacent stores including a (non-Kmart) supermarket.

Gemco has been well covered in other topics here, but I'm looking for more info now on the history and geographic scope of Memco, its east coast cousin. I know for sure that most of the stores were in the DC area, and that there were stores in the Triad area of North Carolina, and that the whole ope...

Related: does anyone know of any stores specifically that made the entire Colonial >> Big Star >> Harris-Teeter progression and are still open as HT locations? I can think of exactly one, the aforementioned Park Road Shopping Center store in Charlotte. Most of the others I can think of have closed i...

For those of you who don't read the front page, I've done a major update of the Greensboro section of the site. It's not 100% complete (the 1980s and several photos aren't done), but I'm pretty pleased with it. There's about three times as much text and there are numerous vintage photos; there's a t...

Very nice photos. Thanks. Cool. Now I have a better idea of what the Barracks Road Colonial looked like when it opened here in Charlottesville. It's a Kroger now, just renovated. I think you mentioned this store in another thread as well. Was it one of the stores Kroger took over from Harris Teeter?...

Great photos. I'm going to move this one to "specific locations/commercial archaeology" though, because it's more about the locations themselves than about general history in the area.

My email correspondent confirms that the city directories show it as a Kroger from 1950 to at least 1965. The Salem address was a Morgan's supermarket, and later a Kroger. So it apparently these weren't actually built as Krogers; maybe they bought out this chain as their entry into Roanoke.

Someone emailed me last night saying it had been a Kroger, but the message wasn't exactly packed with details.

The company history, published in 1989, features an old ad which lists the address merely as "Lower Main Street".

Apparently, this Sunday's "Desperate Housewives" (probably a re-run) centers around a hostage situation in a supermarket. I guess I'll be watching (or more likely fast-forwarding through) this show for the first time just to see if there's anything interesting.