Top 10 Forgotten Grocery Stores

When shopping for groceries and essential items, we often visit a Grocery Store or Supermarket that is convenient. Many factors we look for when choosing a grocery store are often product freshness, stock availability, low prices, value, and good customer service.

We have decided to take our “Top 10” videos to the fascinating world of Forgotten Grocery Store Chains.

As we all know, Walmart is the largest Supermarket chain in the world in terms of revenue but wasn’t long ago before other stores like A&P and Pantry Pride dominated the grocery store market.

▬ Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

0:00 - Intro
1:06 - Colonial Stores
1:44 - Mars
3:35 - Kohl's Food Stores
4:38 - Alpha Beta
6:12 - Eagle Food Centers
7:45 - Bruno's
9:08 - Dominick's
10:28 - Food Fair/Pantry Pride
12:00 - BI-LO
14:20 - A&P

Social Media:

Script & Video Production Rasheed Stevens (Sheednomics)

(Important Links & Sources)

Video Clips

Pictures and Articles (Credit not mentioned in the video)

*** Some Pictures and Videos are from other sources with proper credit given in the video and the description listed above. If you believe credit was not given properly, send me a direct email so that it can be added to the video.***
#grocerystore #top10 #defunct

[jamesclaire]

My grandfather ran the meat department at A&P before he retired. My grandmother purchased all her food and groceries from A&P for years. Today the name is long forgotten. So sad...

[garbo]

Can remember the great smell from the A&P coffee grinders near the end if cashier belts. My mom shopped at Penn Fruit, A&P, Food Fair, Pantry Pride & Path mark all of which long since closed.

[thriftabout]

The actual, official name of A&P was "The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company".

[ralphsanchico]

A&P Ruled back in the day. The smell of that 8: o’clock coffee with the manual grinder located at the end of this large wooden table. In my local store in Brooklyn NY, they would have sawdust on the wooden floors in the meat and deli section! Oh well! Time goes on!

[LatitudeSky]

A tiny bit of A&P still survives: their former flagship house brand 8 o'clock Coffee is still sold in stores everywhere. Now that it is no longer tied to A&P, their former competitors happily sell what was at once time surely the biggest coffee brand in the world. I remember going to an A&P as a kid and my parents gave me a bag of coffee to grind at the front of the store. They did the work but let me feel like I was helping. The machine was at the end of the middle checkout stand where everyone could see it. It was also very loud and everybody could smell the freshly ground coffee. I am sure that loud, fragrant machine right where you could see it work sure helped sell a lot of coffee. Brands like Folgers and Maxwell House owe a debt of gratitude to A&P for making grind it yourself coffee a thing.

[yourguidetorights]

The A&P was our market when I was a kid in the 50's & 60's in Pittsburgh. Brings back memories of shopping there.

[patriciamontagne]

I remember as a child, my parents would ask me to go to our local A&P store to purchase milk and butter every Saturday afternoon. Every Tuesday ny father would purchase Two bags of freshly ground in store Eight O'clock Coffee. My parents were heavy Coffee drinkers. It could be 100 degrees outside, and my parents would consume coffee all the time. Every morning the aroma of coffee swirled around the house all the time. ☺️😚

[MikeB]

As a kid growing up in New Jersey in the '70s, I remember that we had Foodtown, Grand Union, Pantry Pride, Pathmark and Shop Rite.

[P.G.]

No childhood was complete without a trip to A&P for a sweet. Iconic.

[getoffmydarnlawn]

We had a Piggly Wiggly that rebranded to Eagle when I was a kid, it's where my mom did all our grocery shopping. I don't remember the store as much as I remember the baggers. Every register had a bagger, always a guy, who would bag groceries and put them in a cart. The carts had small, numbered 'license plates' and the cashier (always a female) would write that number in black crayon on the back of the receipt. You'd go to your car, pull to the front, flash your numbered receipt and a bagger would load your groceries into your car. Today you're lucky to get a grunt of recognition, not to mention your groceries bagged.

Dominick's was my first job in Chicago many years ago, I worked in the deli for $6/hr and I thought I was rich.

[sheriheffner]

I work at Food Lion. We acquired a dozen BILO employees. They are good people, plus their shoppers. I had no idea they changed their stores names. I used to work at Lowes Foods before coming back to Food Lion. I've been here almost eight years. I started working there back in 2000. So altogether I've been with Food Lion for almost fourteen years.

[vasilioskarras]

Dayton, Ohio here. Our family owned and operated 2 local IGA stores: Wilmington Heights South & North, both on Wilmington Pike in Kettering. My father Jim Karras managed the south store & my uncle Andy Karras the north store & brother Pete Karras helped out as well (mostly produce manager). Fond memories growing up in the 70's, 80's & 90's. Both locations closed in the late 90's with my father Jim passing away shortly later in 1997. Couldn't compete with the larger Cub Foods (Lofino' s owned), Kroger & the new kid in town Meijer who still has one of their best stores within a mile north of our South location on Wilmington Pike. People loved our fresh meats, crazy day sales & import products mostly from Greece since all my family came from Greece. Not the same now. Dot's is still around (great meats) so I would encourage everyone to shop small if you still can.

[rjmcallister]

When the family moved to St. Louis in 1965, the major stores were A&P and Kroger. Others included National Foods, Bettendorf-Rapp, Safeway, IGA, TomBoy and two smaller, local stores, Schnucks and Dierbergs. Today, the two local stores dominate the market. A&P dissolved in 2017, though it's IP is active. Kroger left STL in 1985. Chicago-based National was acquired by Canadian-based Loblaws, then shuttered in the early 90's. An employee-owned revival only lasted a year or two. Schnucks bought Bettendorf-Rapp from American Stores in 1970, launching their expansion. They acquired some assets from both Kroger and National as they closed, then acquired about half Supervalu's Shop 'n Save stores when UNFI bought out Supervalu in 2019 and started liquidating their retail. Safeway pulled out of much of the Midwest in the 70's and is now part of Albertsons. There are a few IGA's left, but mostly in rural towns. Minneapolis-based Supervalu had purchased the local IGA distributor in 1979, starting the Shop 'n Save brand here. TomBoy faded from view; it's smaller, neighborhood stores couldn't compete. Dierbergs started as one store in 1856 and has expanded to 26, all in metro STL. Schnucks has around 115 stores in four states. Both are still family-owned. Kroger returned to the market a few years ago with it's Ruler Foods small-format, discounted house-brand stores. At least one is in a store they abandoned as a Kroger nearly 40 years ago. And then there's Wallyworld and Target, along with Whole Paycheck Foods, Fresh Thyme and discounters Aldi (1979) and Save a Lot (1978), which is based in STL. Lidl has not expanded this far west, yet.

[P_RO_]

Just found this. There's a huge amount of history behind many of the stores you covered here, and remnants of some remain. BiLo store #1 still stands with their 60's and 70's iconic life-sized plastic cow statue still sitting on top of it- only now it's a junkyard office. In nearby Clemson SC there were several BiLo's, and a springtime fraternity tradition was to steal one of the cows each year, always returning it a couple weeks later. Nobody was ever caught pulling off that prank. A&P began as the Atlantic and Pacific Tea company, only branching into groceries when a tenant in one of their warehouses went broke and they sold what was abandoned. Piggly-Wiggly stores still exist in places. Post WW2 they focused on the poor and Black communities in the segregated south which didn't have real grocery stores, and that's where the remaining locations still exist. Piggly-Wiggly invented the modern grocery store/retail shopping system with aisles and carts and a check-out line at the front as a means to reduce employees while increasing the flow of customers using smaller than usual locations. They also originated the practice of restocking displays at night with cheap part-time workers wanting an extra job while not getting in the way of daytime sales. Winn-Dixie was prolific in the south where every town of any size had one, they tried to be the first into these places thus getting the entire market there because there wasn't enough business for competitors to exist.

There are still some smaller regional chains left but the big names all came to failure after selling out to large corporations or unrelated businesses who wanted more profits and over-expanded them into ruin, or who milked them dry of money without re-investing into the business. Most of the remaining small chains are family-owned businesses or semi-independent franchises like IGA, or upscale stores instead of discount-price ones. WalMart has made it tough for them but there are still plenty of us who prefer to do business with our local grocers and always will.

[alexstronczek]

I live in South Carolina and I sure do miss Bi-Lo. They had great stuff at reasonable prices. I frequented the one in Cayce while in college. I hate that it was Food Lion that bought a lot of the remaining stores here in S.C. as I find them to be a inferior grocery store.

[roseprevost]

As a Baltimorean, I can tell you that Mars is not forgotten. Many of us miss it terribly.

[tb-ik]

Very interesting about Kohl's! I had no idea they began as a grocery store.

[greeneyes]

When I was very young, we had the Iowa Pork Shops in Long Beach, CA. They had a real butcher, bought some of their fruit and veg from local truck farmers, and the bakery was excellent. Bags of flour, not junk brought in by Sysco, etc.

[sybilgordon]

My First job was at A & P Food Stores on General Meyer Ave. in Lower Coast of Algiers, when I was 16! (Worked
"Bottle Sorter" -separated the Coca Cola, Pepsi, R.C. bottles). Worked my way up to Stock Boy, Warehouse Receiving, etc.. Started out making .25 cents an hour in 1966, to almost $3.20 an hour in 1980!!! W. Joseph Gordon

[greg]

I was just a kid in the 60's living in Pittsburgh. But I remember the A&P Stores near my house! Those were the days!