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 Nor...

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 ...

   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, ...