Groceteria.com

For some time now, I have been working on a long-term project to profile a number of the local malls in the Seattle area, and currently among other things I am working on the Crossroads shopping center in Bellevue. Recently, some digging in newspapers shows that when this particular mall first opened in 1963, it was anchored by a Market Basket grocery store (apparently also known as the "Mighty MB" based on their logo.) I have been looking for info on this store, and although I have seen the Market Basket name applied to a couple of modern chains based in Texas and New Jersey, and what appears to have been a Kroger-owned chain in California that existed into the eighties, I have found little info to link these stores in the Seattle area to any of these. If some of the other info I have seen is correct, this particular store space later belonged to a Big Bear, then a Lucky store, although I can't be certain of timeframes on those. It now holds a Michaels Arts and Crafts store. You can find some of the research that I have done at the following post on my Blog:

http://thesledgehammer.wordpress.com/20 ... questions/

So the questions that I have are these:

-Was the Market Basket chain in the Seattle area connected in any way to the one in California?
-Was it in any way related to the Marketime chain of stores in Seattle that later got acquired by Fred Meyer?
-Is there any additional info on this chain to be found anywhere?

Thanks,
-Brian

P.S. People here might also be interested in some info I found on the recently closed Marina style Safeway in Bellevue, and a profile of the brand new store that replaced it:

Old store: http://thesledgehammer.wordpress.com/20 ... e-safeway/
New store: http://thesledgehammer.wordpress.com/20 ... e-safeway/

Interesting discussion, and I hope to see it continue, but the pesky moderator/neat freak in me requests that we start new topics in the correct forums (shopping centers, etc.) rather than continuing to steer this one away from Market Basket stores.

Thanks,
David

Since none of the subsequent posts in this thread had anything whatsoever to do with the topic of the original post, I have split this into two new topics:

Seattle Area White Front Stores
Seattle Area Fred Meyer Stores

Again, these are great topics, but please (please, please) help me and other users out by starting new topics in the correct forums rather than letting the discussion stray completely away from their original topic like this one did.

Responses to the original post are still welcome here.

Thanks,
David

Updating this with a bit more info that I found in another microfilm session tonight:

Market Basket was in fact related to Marketime, and in fact by 1967 (when both of them existed at Crossroads) they were sharing the same ads in the paper (although MB had ditched their cool logo for something a lot more mundane that matched Marketime's logo.) By late 1969, there are still Marketime ads in the paper, but Market Basket seems to have closed down by then. Previously, I had assumed that the store became a Mayfair after this, but it turns out that the Mayfair store in that area was in a different location at that time.

I've got some photos, I'll post them on my Blog once I write a research update there.