Groceteria.com

Hello! Back from a Labour Day's weekend in Winnipeg. I travelled to the city hoping to find some traces of Safeway's past...and the city had them in spades. This is the Safeway marina store at 594 Mountain Avenue...quite possibly the best-looking supermarket in the entire city. It is the only one o...

Gee, you've been very busy!

I wish I could think of something to add. I love Boston, but I've only been there once.

I've perused your website, and I gotta admit that I've derived a not-small amount of humour and glee from the thought that there are two Gay Canuckistani Mercerians out here in the wild. LOL Mike! A chance in a million! Are you anywhere remotely close to northern Ontario, by any chance? I'd love to...

This weekend, I stumbled upon a horde of historical images from Winnipeg uploaded by a Flickr user named Jerry Olenko. (What the sources were are anyone's guess...he doesn't say.) As might be expected, there are a wealth of supermarket images to go around. Here's what I found: Dominion and Loblaws (...

You know...I was familiar with American Stores' role as the corporate parent of Acme and Alpha Beta, but it never once before crossed my mind that the name predated the 1979 Skaggs sale, or that Acme itself could have once been called that. "American Stores" was surely a generic name* that...

I'm intrigued by this "American" chain. It utterly dominated the city's market in the 1930s and 1940s...then it shrivelled up at a fast clip and was history by 1960. There's got to be a story behind this. Even more strangely, none of their stores appear to have been reused by competing cha...

As an archivist and local history researcher, one of my favourite resources is small-town yearbooks. These often contain sponsor ads and photos of local scenes, and sometimes these are the only real record of the businesses that once existed in places that were simply too small to ever command a cit...

Great. Do you have pictures of any similar or identical signs?

Oddly enough, it seems as if Safeway's signs got more elaborate over the course of the Marina era, not less. This one's in Winnipeg, and dates to 1963:

Here in Thunder Bay, Ontario, a Safeway store has operated at 115 Arthur Street West since June 1959. There's a catch, though: The building has been torn down and rebuilt on the same site twice , first in 1977 and then in 1991. So the current store is only about thirty years old. (Damn, 1991 was 30 ...

I've been somewhat inactive here lately, putting supermarkets and city history on the back burner. But no matter: I'm definitely eager to see the updates for Springfield! Some thoughts... * 712 N Glenstone was never a chain supermarket. Good to know. * It's also good to get confirmation that 1615 S ...

BillyGr wrote: ↑04 Apr 2021 14:29 Came up with photos for me - perhaps you aren't logged in to Facebook in general?

Of course I'm not logged in: I don't have a Facebook account, and I resent the presumption that I should. That's why I post here instead!

FYI, your link just gives me a Facebook login screen.

Mainebadger wrote: ↑06 Feb 2021 22:38 Is Dominion still around in Canada?

Not anymore; unless you count the Loblaws-owned bizarro offshoot in Newfoundland, which I don't.

Wow, new replies! 3010 Cahill Main, Fitchburg - Converted to Copps; still operating in 2020 as Pick N' Save. This store isn't on the spreadsheet yet. 6310 Century Ave., Middleton - This store isn't on the spreadsheet either. I think the Madison city directories always omitted coverage of the surroun...

With a few hours' worth of writing last night (and a fair amount of photography in 2019, when I could still cross the border), Chatham has been given a "Supermartifacts" write-up:

http://www.andrewturnbull.net/chatham1.html