ACME Supermarket Commercial
Acme Markets Inc. is a supermarket chain operating 159 stores throughout Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, the Hudson Valley of New York, and Pennsylvania and, as of 1998, is a subsidiary of Albertsons, and part of its presence in the Northeast. It is headquartered in East Whiteland Township, Pennsylvania, near Malvern, a Philadelphia suburb.
Acme Markets has 159 supermarkets in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
After many decades of being the largest grocery retailer in the Delaware Valley, Acme fell to No. 2 behind ShopRite in 2011. As of 2013, Acme was No. 3 behind No. 1 ShopRite and No. 2 The Giant Company in the region.
Early history
Irish immigrants, Samuel Robinson and Robert Crawford, founded what is now Acme in south Philadelphia in 1891. In 1917, Robinson and Crawford merged Acme Markets with four other Philadelphia-area grocery stores, including English immigrant S. Canning Childs New Jersey–based American grocery chain; the new company was named American Stores. In 1927, smaller rival Penn Fruit began operating in Philadelphia’s Center City. In the late 1920s, supermarkets under the American Stores banner rapidly sprouted throughout the Philadelphia region, rivaling New Jersey–based A&P, which then featured downtown stores throughout the East Coast, and as far west as New Orleans. American Stores first introduced self-service stores in shopping centers in the early 1950s.
Expansion and acquisition
In 1961, the American Stores company acquired southern California’s Alpha Beta chain of supermarkets. Many of Acme’s stores in the 1960s and 1970s were paired with a regional drugstore chain, a PLCB liquor store (in Pennsylvania), a Kmart, or Woolco (earlier centers had a Woolworth), and in rarer cases a department store such as Sears or JCPenney. American Stores also bought the Philadelphia franchise rights to the then fast-growing restaurant chain Pizza Hut in 1968. Acme would also acquire a number of stores from Kmart Foods (as did A&P, Safeway, and Kroger); however, in the late 1970s, many recently closed 1950s-era supermarkets in Philadelphia and close suburbs were reopened as independents IGA or Thriftway/Shop ‘n Bag. Starting in the 1980s, these independents were overtaken by family chains Genuardi’s (later acquired by Safeway and now defunct) and Clemens (also defunct) along with Giant-Carlisle and Giant-Landover in newer suburbs, and modernized Acme, Super Fresh, and Pathmark stores in the city and older suburbs not long after.
Acme in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania in May, 2014 (Store #1756). This store closed in 2018.
From 1978 to 1982, Acme acquired many stores during Food Fair’s bankruptcy, including both ex-Food Fair (by then known as discount grocer Pantry Pride) and Penn Fruit units. The bulk of these dated to the 1950s. The former Food Fair/Pantry Pride stores were replaced by or remodeled into stores with the standard Acme prototype of the 1970s, as were many expanded A-Frame buildings and a few former Pathmark (these were former ShopRite) stores. Former Penn Fruit buildings, with their trademark barrel roof, could not be adapted to this model. Even many A-Frames were replaced by the often older but larger acquired stores.
In the early 1970s, Acme introduced a discount chain, Super Saver, in an effort to compete in densely populated areas.[6] Both chains had the slogan “Acme and Super Saver – you’re going to like it here!” The brand Super Saver was retired in the 1980s, only to be resurrected in the 1990s in the West. Some isolated stores retained the signage into the early 1990s, however.
American Stores were sold in 1979 to the Skaggs Companies which took the American Stores name, moving its headquarters to Salt Lake City. Also in 1979, American Stores announced that it would be closing most of its stores in New York state. In the 1980s, American Stores undertook various acquisitions (including Chicago metropolitan area chain Jewel Food Stores) which ran the Jewel-T chain; it operated in many former urban Acme buildings. In 1995, Acme sold 45 stores in northeastern Pennsylvania to Penn Traffic. American Stores was acquired by major Western and Southern chain Albertsons in November 1999.
In 2006, Albertsons’ supermarket holdings were bought by Cerberus Capital Management and SuperValu and divided between the two companies, with Acme going to SuperValu. In 2013 Cerberus, which was operating the Albertsons stores it owned under the name Albertsons LLC, agreed to purchase Acme from SuperValu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_Markets
Video preservation by DDVF.com for educational purposes. Original airdate was Feb 1987.
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