FORGOTTEN Grocery Stores from the past - Life in America

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MORE FORGOTTEN Grocery Stores from the past - Life in America

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Top 10 Forgotten Grocery Stores

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199,394 views Premiered Apr 22, 2022
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

 

Top 10 Forgotten Grocery Stores (Part 2)

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2,371 views Oct 6, 2022
As we all know… or in case you didn't know…a grocery store is a store that primarily sells food products that may be fresh or packaged. Larger format stores are referred to as supermarkets and hypermarkets usually stock significant amounts of non-food

products, such as clothing and household items. Today’s video, we’ve decided to continue our “Top 10” list to the fascinating world of Forgotten Grocery Store Chains Part 2.

 

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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.

&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.