Category: Interesting Stores

Posted on

It’s cold here in Groceteria City.

Just for the record, I’m still here. I haven’t added anything big for a month or two, but I’ve been working on small updates and fixes all over the site, adding some new locations and clarifying some missing information with newspaper archives. I’m working on several updates to the Seattle area (suburbs, mostly) and I promise that major New Jersey update is still coming as well.

For now, please enjoy the above Metro location on Ellesmere Rd. Scarborough, Ontario. It started life as a Grand Union, quickly flipped to Steinbergs, later to Dominion, and finally Metro. It become Toronto’s first supermarket to be designated under the Ontario Heritage Act ten years ago.

Posted on

I visited Charlotte this afternoon because I needed a quick change of scenery and I had some errands I could just as easily do there.

While driving around, I snapped a photo of this former A&P on Freedom Drive, which I often do when I’m in the area:

I came home and got started looking at some old video from 1999.. It turns out I was also in Charlotte exactly twenty years ago today (on a visit home from San Francisco, where I lived at the time) and just happened to shoot video of this same former A&P for what was then the very new Groceteria.com:

So there you have it: the oldest and newest pictures I have of the former A&P on Freedom Drive, coincidentally shot exactly twenty years apart to the day.

I’m not sure when the tree burst forth from the asphalt…

Posted on

Just returned from a snowy weekend in New Jersey, with side trips to Philadelphia and (drum roll, please) Wilmington, Delaware? Why the drum roll? Because I now have the data in hand to complete Groceteria’s 50th state, which I promised to do by the site’s 20th anniversary this summer. That’s coming soon, but for now, here are some recent additions and updates:

The store above is a still-standing Food Fair on Brunswick Avenue in Trenton NJ. There’s another one that’s even better here.

Also, I’ll be visiting the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne next month and will be filling in a lot of holes using their massive collection of print city directories from around the country. That trip will also take me to Detroit, Toledo, and possibly Lansing and Milwaukee. More soon.

Posted on

The Kroger location at 700 Spinning Road near Dayton, Ohio, apparently opened in 1967 as part of a small shopping center. Sometime in the 1980s, it was remodeled into a smaller adaptation of the “Greenhouse” style stores Kroger was opening throughout the chain. This decor package featured curving walls and super-graphics using the Bauhaus font. In most stores. The signage colors varied by department, but this is not the case in the Dayton store,. Based on the colors currently used, I suspect the signs may have been repainted during the “Grid” decor years of the 1990s. Otherwise, it is a pretty faithful abbreviated version of the “Greenhouse” model, and it still seems to be doing a pretty brisk business.