The Old-School Grocery Chain Store Your Great-Grandma Shopped At Is Now Just A Memory

Few buildings represent the modern world quite like a supermarket. Thanks to globalization and advanced logistics, we can now find almost every type of food imaginable under one roof, year-round. There's a reason why former Russian president Boris Yeltsin was pictured getting his mind blown at a random grocery store in Texas — if you're not used to it, such abundance is almost inconceivable. Stores like A&P, the grocery chain your great-grandma may have shopped at, have vanished, overtaken by the modern, more efficient supermarkets we know today.

A&P started life as the Great American Tea Company, which was founded in 1859 by George Gilman and George Huntington Hartford. After enjoying a great deal of success, the company was renamed The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Hartford's son, John, opened the first A&P Economy Store in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1912 — a no-frills grocery store that sold only a small selection of food products at very low prices. The lack of a delivery option, which was standard for grocery stores at the time, and the presence of only a single employee helped cut prices further. 

Business boomed to the point where A&P expanded its product options and even bought wholesalers outright. As you can imagine, this was terrible for mom-and-pop grocery stores, which couldn't afford to keep up with A&P and folded. But it was terrific for A&P — and for an American public willing to spend money after the end of the Depression.

For a time, A&P was one of the most recognizable brands in America. There's a reason why John Updike and Don DeLillo, two of American literature's foremost chroniclers of 20th-century life, featured A&P stores so prominently in their work — the chain had become virtually synonymous with the concept of a grocery store. The idea of A&P going out of business must have seemed as improbable as McDonald's or Walmart shutting their doors today. (Walmart may have a major waste problem, but it hasn't gotten that bad.) And yet, thanks to a confluence of factors, that's just what happened.

A&P may have revolutionized the way we shopped, but it didn't do much to keep up with further innovations. As early as the 1950s, A&P stores had a reputation for being rather small and shabby, without offering as wide a range of groceries as competitors like Safeway (which has fallen on hard times itself) and Kroger (the oldest grocery store chain in America). To make matters worse, when A&P decided to close some stores in 1969, it did so throughout Southern California — which happened to be the fastest-growing market in the country at the time. Attempts were made to turn the ship around, including several new store formats and an ill-advised acquisition of PathMark in 2007, but at that point, the decline was more or less terminal. The last A&P closed in 2016, and a chapter of American history closed with it.