Nothing lasts forever: Just ask National Tea, Penn Fruit, Grand Union

Oct 7, 2015by Elliot Zwiebach in Viewpoints

Supermarkets, like all businesses, come and go. Some disappear suddenly, while others fade ever so slowly from sight.

A&P, which has been fading away for years, is about to give up the ghost after 156 years — a spectacular run, certainly, for a company that once actually did stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Then there’s Haggen, which will disappear rather suddenly from Southern California, Arizona and Nevada just months after opening — before most consumers ever learned how to pronounce the name.

While the plan is to re-trench from 164 units to 38 core stores in the Pacific Northwest, that run may be limited, given that company officials have indicated the investment group that owns Haggen may ultimately opt to seek a buyer for the core.

Looking back at issues of SN over the last 60-plus years makes it clear that companies that dominated the industry in one era do not always endure into another — acquired or absorbed by competitors or simply closed down, their names discarded and forgotten. Ah, but once they were giants!

• Like National Tea, once the nation’s third largest chain — a victim of a 1975 price war in its hometown of Chicago that prompted the company to sell the bulk of its Chicago-area stores to A&P.

Once Toronto-based Loblaw Cos. gained majority control of the chain in 1982, it continued to operate National Tea units in St. Louis and New Orleans until 1995, when it sold all the stores to Schnuck, which spun off the New Orleans segment to Schwegmann Giant Food Stores. Schnuck is still around — Schwegmann is long gone.

• Like Penn Fruit, a major player in the Philadelphia market, which never recovered from a predatory price war in 1972 and sold its stores four years later to A&P.

• Like Grand Union, once a dominant player in the Northeast and Southeast. The company exited its Big Star stores in Atlanta in the early 1990’s to focus resources on the Northeast, but after several management changes and three bankruptcies, Grand Union liquidated its assets in 2000.

• And like A&P, once the scourge of the industry — the Walmart of its day, in many ways. It was the spread of A&P stores in the early part of the 20th century that led Congress to pass the Robinson-Patman Act, which requires suppliers to offer identical prices to all customers.

While the power of each of these giants ebbed, dozens of other, less prominent companies strutted their hour upon the stage and exited, including the following:

One of Penn Traffic's P&C Market stores.

• In the Northeast: Bread & Circus, Daitch-Shopwell, Genuardi’s, Food Fair, Penn Traffic, Victory Super Markets.

• In the Southeast: Bruno’s, Colonial Stores, Delchamps, Jitney Jungle, Kash ‘n Karry, Red Stores, Seessel’s, Ukrop's, White Stores.

• In the Midwest: Buttrey’s, Dominick’s Finer Foods, First National (Finast), Fisher Foods, Fresh Fields, Hinky Dinky, E.F. MacDonald Co., Milgram’s, Preston Safeway, Red Owl, Seaway Food Town.

• In the Southwest: Furr’s, Gerland’s, Rice, Weingarten.

• In the West: All-American Markets, Alpha Beta, Boys Markets, Brown & Cole, Hughes Markets, Lucky Stores, Shopping Bag, Thriftimart.

• And among wholesalers, Fleming, once the largest supplier in the U.S., plus Flickinger’s, Malone & Hyde, Super Food Services and Wetterau.

So today’s industry leaders should be aware that nothing stays the same, and even giants can fall off their beanstalks and crash.