And as always, if you followed @GroceteriaWeb on Twitter, you’d already know about these. You’d also see lots of photos when I’m on the road.

New location lists:

Updates to existing lists:

 

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.

Once again, if you followed me on Twitter, you’d hear about these as they happen. You’d also see lots of pictures when I travel. And your life would be complete, guaranteed.

New pages:

Updates:

Not to say I’m winding down the location lists (I’m definitely not) but after what I think is a pretty incredible run of those the past few years, I feel like working on something else for a while. And the new time-suck seems likely to be a digital library of my accumulated photos and documents (or at least the ones that copyright law will permit me to post). Keep in mind that this is actually what I do for a living as well, which may make the process go much faster…or much slower.

Library geek alert: For those of you who care about such things, I may build out the library using the Omeka platform, mainly because it would also help me to learn some of its quirks. At my day job, I am in the process of migrating our rather extensive digital collections from a commercial product called CONTENTdm to an open-source platform called Islandora. Both of those are more firepower than I really need here, so I’m going with Omeka, which will be considerably less labor-intensive. Unless I decide to get really creative at extending WordPress, like I did with this site.

Anyhow, watch this space…

 

Even though it has been a bit difficult to make myself sit at my computer all evening after sitting at it all day (work from home continues for me), I have made some additions. You’d know about these already if you followed the Message Board and/or Twitter:

Stay safe. And wear your mask, dammit!

You might think staying at home 24-7 would mean that I would be doing lots of updates on the site. Sadly, it’s not really working out that way. After working from home all day ay my day job, the prospect of sitting at the same desk all night is not all that enticing. Nevertheless, I am working on a Houston location list that may be up later this week.

Other updates since the last time I mentioned them here:

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay home.

It’s a good article (and not just because it cites me, thank you) about the history and future of Canadian supermarkets by food writer Corey Mintz. I’ll inclue the part that feeds my ego, but you should read all of it.

In the early twentieth century, there was no such thing as a one-stop shop for food. “You’d go out in the morning to the grocery store, for canned goods and bulk stuff,” explains David Gwynn, a librarian at the University of North Carolina and a supermarket historian. While there, you would speak with a shopkeeper to obtain your items; they filled your order behind the counter, weighing out dried goods from barrels. Customers would know the shopkeepers by name—and, often, vice versa. Other kinds of foodstuffs required trips to separate shops as part of this daily ritual: butchers and fishmongers, greengrocers and bakeries. These stores were much smaller than the ones we’re used to—maybe 1,000 square feet or less, says Gwynn—and were everywhere in our cities.

Transformed by a childhood visit to an old A&P, Gwynn is a grocery obsessive who maintains ­groceteria.com, a database of US and Canadian supermarkets past and present. Want to know the years that the Piggly Wiggly at 384 Academy Road in Winnipeg became a Shop-Easy (1950) and then a Tom Boy (1961)? Gwynn has answers. His vacations always include visits to older stores, ­ancient outlets like Pay’n Takit treated like ­houses of worship.

I think the map has filled in quite nicely since I recommitted to the site about four years ago.

The most recent additions (that you can get as they happen via Twitter):

More to come!