A&P Supermarket 1938 Public Domain via Creative Commons
This article examines the history of the legendary A&P Supermarket chain of grocery stores and what it was like to work in one of them. A&P was one of the most loved grocery stores in New York history. The first half is written from a genuine first-hand perspective of what it was like to work at the A&P Supermarket. The second half looks back at the store’s long history.
When attending junior college in 1981, I entered the A&P Supermarket in Lake Grove for a job. It was tough to find a job in 1981. The United States was in a horrible recession. It was the worst year the county had since the Great Depression. (1) Luckily, I walked in at the right time and got hired. I started in the meat department. I would eventually work in every department of the store, but the meat department was the most challenging department to work in.
There were two tough butchers of German descent in that meat department and a wise guy meat manager. They were tough, but they were genuine and fair. My job was to wrap the meat they cut, weigh it, and slap a price on it. This was all old school. Nothing came in prepackaged. It was like working in that meat plant where Rocky hit those sides of beef on a smaller scale. Big slabs of beef came in with crates full of chickens. Almost all of the meat cutting was done in that meat department. This is how the A&P Supermarkets operated. I would be sent to other stores on occasion, and it was all the same
Some of the meat was cut up on a huge band saw, but the majority of the meat was cut up by hand by these three tough butchers. These guys were good. They would be talking really loud, almost screaming at each other, cutting the meat, swearing, screaming, laughing, talking war stories, work stories, the old neighborhood stories, etc… All while swinging a big scary butcher knife non-stop with brilliant precision while never losing a finger or limb. It was cold. Their faces were red, and the cold air they breathed formed big clouds as they talked.
These butchers weren’t scared of anybody but the Board of Health inspectors. When those Board Of Heath inspectors came in, their personalities changed dramatically. These butchers were all union workers. They belonged to Local 342 Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union. Everyone who worked in the store belonged to that union. The union helped protect these butchers from nervous store managers to a certain extent, but there was no protection from the Board Of Health, which was a good thing for all of us. If those inspectors found no violations, the butchers would be in the greatest mood for the rest of the day. However, if a violation was written up, the rest of the day would be a nightmare in that department.
The story of these butchers and how meat was processed in-store was very symbolic of the way old-school supermarkets like A&P served their customers. The meat department was lined with large glass windows that the butchers could slide open to talk to the customers. Some people would come in every day and ask the butchers to slice them a particular type of cut of meat. It was face-to-face contact. The butchers really cared about their work and their customers. I learned a lot about work ethic from those guys. The customers would have conversations with the butchers. The customers looked forward to it, and it seemed so did many of the butchers. Many customers were older, in their 60s,70s and 80s. These people were born in the early 1990s. This was an old way of doing things. A&P represented that old way. Of course there are still supermarkets with butchers that have relationships with people, but this was different, this was the norm.
A&P had a large following of customers who loved certain A&P brands. Standing at the top of that list was their Eight O Clock Coffee. While that brand can still be found in Supermarkets, it was sold differently during the A&P days. At the front of the store were large coffee grinders; customers would buy the whole bean bags of A&P coffee, and the cashiers would grind it for them. Ask anyone who you think might remember the A&P supermarkets and I guarantee you the first thing they will mention is how much they loved their coffee. Every day I went to work, I was hit by that incredible aroma of coffee when I entered the store. A different company is still producing eight O’Clock Coffee, but in my opinion, it doesn’t smell or taste the same as it did when A&P sold it.
1922 Ad for Eight O Clock Coffee– Public Domain Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. / Public domain
I worked in every department of that A&P store. The deli department was much smaller than we see now in stores like Shoprite or Stop & Shop. It was so small that most of the time it was only manned by one or two workers. As in most supermarket delis, ham, cheese, turkey, and roast beef were all the cold cuts most commonly sold. However, there was a significant base of customers, usually those 60 and older that would order old school deli cold cuts like head cheese and liverwurst. Once again, it was that old customer base shopping for old-time products.
Back in the 80s, grocery clerks still used grocery guns to place prices on grocery items. Scanning had not yet infiltrated the stores. Clerks would get a sheet of prices and set the gun for the price and date. You were assigned one grocery gun, and if you lost it, it would cost you. When items went on sale, one would have to slap a new sticker over the old sticker with the sale price. Then, do it again when the item comes off sale. It was a never-ending battle of stocking shelves and pricing items all in real time. Savvy customers would often try to peel the stickers off to see if there was a cheaper sticker underneath. New items were always placed in the back of the shelves behind the older items. Whenever I go grocery shopping, I know to reach the back of the shelves because that item is almost always fresher.
Every department had its own manager. Meat, produce, frozen, deli, front end, and so on. Most of these managers were full-time lifers. It was an excellent full-time job. The pay was good, there was always overtime, and there were benefits. Of course, if you were a department manager, you would always work way more hours than you should have. Most people were dedicated and, of course, needed to make the numbers work in their departments so they would not be forced out by being sent to another store two hours from where they lived. It was a good job, but like many jobs, there was intense pressure, and I could see it on their faces every day. The managers had to know precisely how much of a product to order and ensure all of it sold. They had to know their customer base well. What they liked, what they could afford, and what they would buy or ignore. That separated stores like A&P and that era from how supermarket chains operate now. It was on a much more personal level. That personal level is a great place to start when looking back at the history of the A&P supermarket chain.
A&P Supermarket History
The history of the A&P Grocery Stores goes back to the Civil War. The company began as a mail-order Tea Company. The company’s original name was set as the Great American Tea Company. It was started by George Huntington Hartford and George Gilman in 1863. Six years later, they renamed the company the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.
With its origins in New York City, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company would become one of the United States’ first big chain stores. While tea was the first featured special item sold by the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, the developing grocery store chain would become famous for its specialty products besides tea. This would include, of course, their Eight O Clock Coffee, along with their own unique brand of spices and very much-needed condensed milk. Customers fell head-over-heels for these products immediately. Products were sold at very reasonable prices, which helped to forge incredible loyalty between customers and stores. For many, that loyalty lasted a lifetime. I observed it firsthand working at that A&P.
In 1901, A&P became a corporation and moved its headquarters to New Jersey. From that point on, it would concentrate on becoming the biggest grocery store chain in the United States. A feat the company would achieve for a certain amount of time. From 1917 to 1962, they were the most successful supermarket chain in the United States.
The company set the way for many other future companies in the way they vertically integrated their business. Profits will always be higher if you’re selling your own products instead of another company. A&P introduced its brand, Ann Page, which produced a wide variety of products sold at a lower price than the name brands. This was not about a name-brand company slapping the grocery store’s name on their products. A&P manufactured their products. The company even purchased fishing fleets and did their fishing.
The company also produced its own baked goods and even published its magazine, Woman’s Day. What better way to sell products than to advertise them in a magazine you own that is read by the gender that did all the shopping? The company had taken a page from John Rockefeller’s playbook of Vertical Integration from the turn of the century. It made its own by establishing modern ways of producing, advertising, and selling goods that had never been done that way before.
A&P started as a mail-order tea company that evolved into delivering multiple products to people. They eventually opened up twenty-eight grocery stores, primarily located in New York. By 1900, they had grown to two hundred grocery stores. By 1925, the company had over fourteen thousand grocery stores across the United States and started to break into other countries such as Canada. In 1936, A&P evolved from being known as a “grocery store” to a “supermarket.” Simply put, the stores expanded in size. However, similarly to the trust busters of the President Theodore Roosevelt era at the turn of the 19th century, the United States Department of Justice went after monopolies again in 1938. The A&P Corporation responded by closing many of its divisions of goods production to slim down its vertical integration methods.
From 1950 to 1974, A&P continued to expand its stores in size. They changed their model from grocery store to supermarket. Sadly, that change would also permanently result in the company closing many of its smaller stores. In the late 1970s, the company was sold to the Tengelmann Group of Germany. In the 1980s, A&P would acquire other supermarket chains such as the Food Emporium and Waldbaums. Many Waldbaums customers would start looking for A&P products in their stores, not knowing that A&P now owned Waldbaums because A&P never changed the names of the stores they purchased.
In 2007, A&P went broke and purchased the Pathmark Chain of supermarkets. It was not a wise decision. Of course, dreaming again back to the days of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, the concept of buying out your largest competitor still seemed to fuel the A&P business model. Nonetheless, it turned out that although Pathmark was their largest competitor as far as supermarkets went, their most dangerous competitor would turn out to be Walmart’s grocery department. The financial crises of 2007 and 2008 only made things much worse. A&P filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Five years later, during the summer of 2015, A&P filed for bankruptcy again. On November 25 2015, A&P closed all of its stores for good. A company that had begun in the middle of the Civil War over one hundred and fifty years earlier closed its chapter and role in American History permanently.
A&P Founder George Huntington Hartford
Public Domain
Photo of the window display at A&P Grocery Store in 1938
Photo: Public Domain New York Public Library via Creative Commons
Updated April 30, 2024
Sources
Eisenstadt, P. E. (2005). The encyclopedia of New York State/ editor in chief, Peter Eisenstadt ; managing editor, Laura-Eve Moss ; foreword by Carole F. Huxley. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. p. 1
