Grocery Archaeology

Original Tenant: unknown Address: 2625 Lankford Hwy, Exmore, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Fresh Pride (closed May 2014) Photographed:  December 2019 A very interesting bit of Delmarva/Hampton Roads supermarket history here. At one time, the company that owned Fresh Pride Supermarkets owned over 50 supermarkets; by 2013, they were down to just 10, all of which closed abruptly in sequence over the course of a few months. There's not a clear explanation that I was able to find for those closures -- as opposed to the whole chain going out of business all at once, for instance, or selling some individual stores and then closing the rest. I'm not sure what the 28,000 square foot square foot store was built as, or when it was built. But the Fresh Pride signage remained here at least five years after the store's closure, as we see here in 2019. Some inadvertently nice sky in these shots, which were taken on a winter late afternoon on the way to Norfolk. A

Original Tenant: Safeway Address: 20769 Dupont Blvd, Georgetown, DE Opened:  unknown Closed:  1987 Later Tenants:  unknown Photographed:  January 2020 This is a very interesting building here in Georgetown. It's about 20,000 square feet, built around an 11,000 square foot Marina Safeway. Gotta love that arched roof! So this was built by Safeway but closed in 1987 after a dispute with the union. Safeway wanted to cut benefits and a few other things for their union employees, which the workers voted to reject; at which point Safeway decided to close six stores that would become unprofitable. This was one of the six. Shortly after that announcement was made in early 1987, Safeway walked back the decision, announcing that three of the six were not to close (and Georgetown was decided to stay open). After some further negotiations between Safeway, the union, and various local governments and organizations, Safeway agreed to not close any but to sell them all. Some went to Meatland, so

   Welcome back, everyone, to our regularly-scheduled programming of supermarket coverage! We are progressing south along the eastern seaboard of the United States, as promised, through first the Delmarva Peninsula, the first stop south of New Jersey. The peninsula extends south from the Wilmington/Newark, DE and Elkton, MD areas down through Cape Charles, VA. The entirety of the tiny state of Delaware is on the peninsula, along with the eastern part of Maryland, and the southern part of the peninsula is Virginia. The cities paralleling the peninsula on the mainland include, from north to south, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Richmond, and Norfolk is just to the south of the southern tip of the peninsula. So we're going to take a look at a few stores primarily along the US-13/113 corridor as we wander down to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which connects Cape Charles to Norfolk. Head over to  The Independent Edition  for our first Delaware stop, which is interesting, to say the leas

 I think I've mentioned that I spend about half my time in northern New Jersey and the other half in Worcester, Massachusetts. Well, my Bay State companions are known for pronouncing things in a very specific way (as are my Garden State companions, of course). And the DeMoulas chain of supermarkets from northeastern Mass is, in local dialect, pronounced Mahket Bayaskit. Worcester? Wista. Leicester? Lesta. Oxford? Oxfid. Haverhill? Hayvrll. I could go on, but we'll see more of that when we're up in Mass. I estimate this clip, which is part of my collection, is from the 90s. And this toy truck most certainly is, pictured outside of the Oxfid Mahket Bayaskit (which is, of course, the Market Basket supermarket in Oxford, Mass, just south of Worcester). This is not particularly relevant, but I feel obliged to mention that I write these memorabilia posts while watching a livestream of a concert from Indianapolis in a snowstorm in Massachusetts. I said this on the Streetside Sight

A few shots of assorted ACME Ideal coffee cans I've found in my travels. Again, unfortunately, none of these are actually in my collection. Can we take a second to appreciate something I've never noticed before, which is that the middle bar of the E in IDEAL is the same shape as the ACME logo?! Am I just slow to pick up on that? Have others noticed that? Some of these coffee cans have been preserved beautifully, and others have been put to other uses... If I'm not mistaken, that first and last one was taken in the basement of an antique store in Andover, NJ. The middle one was spotted at an antique mall outside of Allentown, PA.

Now the matchbooks are all in my collection, but I have plenty more photos that were spotted in an antique store, or flea market, or so on, that are out of my price range or possibly just too large, or so on. Here's a few shots of coffee cans I spotted out in the field. Red Circle, of course, was one of the A&P private labels along with Bokar and the most famous, Eight O'Clock Coffee. And if A&P tried hard to build a strong brand for their coffee lines, with refined, simple, and elegant package designs, there's always someone going in the other direction... ...which is, of course, ShopRite, who put out this can of COFFEE . (Disappointing, Blogger didn't make that as large as I wanted. But you sure can't miss this package from anywhere!) And here's a scan of the front of a box of 1990s-era ShopRite coffee filters which is, actually, part of my collection. Well, kind of -- I have only the front and back panels of the box, if I'm not mistaken; I don'

Happy spring from Shurfine! This Spring Sale-A-Bration matchbook is a little newer than the Shurfine matchbooks I showed yesterday, with the newer logo which was used up until recently (and is still used by Shur-Save). I've mentioned that some of these matchbooks traveled quite the distance to arrive in an antique store in small-town Maine, but this one would not have had to go far at all. I unfortunately don't know where this grocery store would've been along Stone Street, since so much of that area has seen such significant development recently. But someday, when we get through the rest of New England, we will be visiting Maine! And how about this one... I had never seen this logo for Stop & Shop previously! Unfortunately, other than the name and logo, there's not much else as far as historical information goes. And moving slightly south from Maine, we enter East Pepperell, a beautiful small town (well, it's part of Pepperell) in northern Massachusetts right n

 Possibly the less-famous band led by Tom Robert? Okay, let's get into our third day of matchbooks with this specimen from the defunct southeastern chain . Again, it would be fascinating to know how this St Louis/New Orleans-area chain's matchbook ended up in Maine. Of course, their reach was much wider than that (check out that Wikipedia article for more details), but it's not a chain I'm familiar with. In fact, since it was related to the Loblaw's chain up north, any chance this might have been given out -- maybe even accidentally -- at a Loblaw's? Not too much to see here as far as design goes, just the logo (which is a creative inversion of the Loblaw's L). Heading into more familiar territory, we check out the Providence Public Market Co., whose store would've been here (but of course has been demolished). Additional stores: 93 Weybosset , also apparently demolished; 1880 Westminster , same; 132 Taunton , probably in that brick building, which is p

 Oh yes. It's four days of matches and four days of matching bad puns. Ha! Get it? Jell-O? Oh, no. This is IGA brand Jell-It! Just like grandma always made. Judging from the IGA logo used here, these are certainly from before 1976. And if IGA brand Jell-It isn't for you, maybe you want A Royal Feast of IGA brand canned whole chicken. I have never had a canned whole chicken in my life and I'm not sure I'm interested in trying it. Anyone here ever tried one? Sadly, it's basically impossible to tell what IGA store these were from since they could be from anywhere across New England where there were hundreds of IGA stores over many decades, and they don't have any store-specific information on them. Canned chicken for dinner, Jell-It for dessert, and maybe a cup of Royal Guest coffee to go along with it... So who makes these matches? Well, you might have noticed a few different names on the various packages, but it looks like one of them was from a familiar place...