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Is it just me or did Acme wait until late to really accept shopping centers? Seems like most of the first A Frames (built in the early 1960s) were by themselves in downtown areas, with very small parking lots. By contrast, the bulk of A&Ps built in the 1950s were attached to at least one other store. Same with Food Fair and Penn Fruit. In fact, Food Fair had their "Food Fair Properties" division which specialized in planning and building large plazas. Acme seemed to wait until at least 1964 or 1965, around the same time color pictures and the counterculture were the norm. But I hear that before 1959, A&P actually had a lot of trouble getting into shopping centers in Philadelphia thanks to all their new competition. And as soon as the Centennials stopped being built, A&P was already in financial trouble. Early Pathmark stores not so surprisingly were in inconvenient locations. The long gone Northeast Philadelphia store (closed in 1980-something) which is now a Vietnamese market, along with the Broomall PA one which closed under A&P ownership last year, are prime examples.

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A&P was building stores in shopping centers before WWII and went into many early post-WWII centers. The centennials tended to be built as freestanding stores or with small plazas. The point of departure is the opposite of what you il the assert--they were a shopping center oriented chain until the centennial era. Large shopping centers began having fewer or no super markets from the early 60s onward, so other chains tended to follow a similar course. A&P was still doing well in the early centennial era. Except for First national and a few regionals like Fisher Foods, chains generally had no trouble growing their sales from year to year. By the mid-60s, though, A&P sales were flat (and they weren't the only ones-Kroger, National Tea and others had hit a wall, too), although they were still profitable and did particularly well in certain regions. A&P's financial problems were more a product of the late 60s and early 70s, when they built rather few stores and became heavily dependent on house brand sales. That was the end of the centennial era.