We had a supermarket in the neighborhood - I forget what chain - that was converted to a funeral parlor. We used to joke that they were already set up with walk-in freezers.
I met Roy himself when I was a tyke at a Roy Rogers opening. RR was way better than Arby’s.
I grew up in a northern NJ suburb in the ‘70s. For groceries we shopped at A&P, Pathmark, Stop and Shop. The big hardware place was Rickels.
Northern NJ has an embarrassment of excellent family run pizza/Italian places so I don’t know if any of the chains back then caught on. Our usual place was Pizza Palace in Mt. Freedom.
Other food places were Buxton’s, Friendly’s, Ground Round, McDonald’s, and a ton of diners.
My HS group of friends ate a lot at The Mayflower Chinese restaurant in Morristown.
The local ice cream place was Carvel’s. There was also a DQ but we didn’t go there much. Carvel’s was the place we’d pile into the back of the station wagon and go to while crashing around into each other.
Department stores were Bamberger’s in Morristown, Kmart, Two Guys, Sears
Sports stuff was Dover Sports and Whippany Cycle or K-Mart and Sears
Malls were Rockaway Townsquare, then Livingston (further away), then Morris County Mall (very small) and then the granddaddy was Willowbrook.
There wasn’t any kind of music instrument chain like Guitar Center so it was either one of the local places (Star in Morristown or another place outside of Dover I can’t remember the name of) or, when we got a little older, Long & Mcquade on 46, Manny’s or Sam Ash in NYC. Sam Ash also had a store a few miles outside of the city in Paramus.
I can’t remember the record or bookstores except for a little upstairs record store off of the square in Morristown. Otherwise whatever was in the various malls.
I do not believe the Bill Knapp’s chain ever had a restaurant in Wisconsin. Internet sources do not list WI as a state they operated in. And I lived and/or worked in Milwaukee from 1983 until 2002; I definitely would have noticed. Do you perhaps mean Marc’s Big Boy?
Yup, both the grocery stores and the department stores were founded by Maxwell Kohl. One of Maxwell’s sons is Herb Kohl, who ran the family company for a while, and later was the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, and served several terms in the U.S. Senate, representing Wisconsin.
Sendik’s is a worthy successor for Kohl’s. But I do fondly remember Kohl’s as being the fanciest grocery store I’d ever encountered, back in 1965. And my mom agreed! They had a ‘foreign foods’ aisle back then, where you could get chinese and mexican items. They even carried chocolate covered ants. My dad bought some but I wouldn’t try them.
Interesting! I thought Safeway was only on the west coast. I remember that architecture of the old Safeway buildings here south of Seattle. I can’t think of any that remain.
The JC Penney’s in both Southcenter and Tacoma malls both had restaurants when I was a kid. The food was good (from my kid perspective) plus kids got a free clown sundae. It was an ice cream cone turned upside down on a plate (so the cone was a hat) and candy for eyes, nose and mouth. I loved them.
Primarily, but Wikipedia indicates that, by 1932, they were across most of the western U.S., as well as in the Mid-Atlantic and western Canada. The map below illustrates the number of stores by state/province as of 1932:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/df/Safeway_store_numbers_by_state_in_1932.gif
How embarrassing! You’re right, of course, I got my [common firstname]_[double consonant shortlastname] mixed up. It was George Webb’s.
Ah, now there’s a quirky chain! Where else can you get ‘chicken flavored noodle soup’? I always like their eggs benedict. But that 2 am bars closed crowd is always a bit dodgy.
There was a Jahn’s in New Jersey on Route 4 in Paramus, NJ that my folks brought me to once in a great while. I had no idea it was local chain.
My mom usually took me to Friendly’s for ice cream (don’t think I ever had a meal there) when shopping, because one was inside Willowbrook Mall. Friendly’s is still around, but a lot less of what it used to be. I used to love their watermelon sherbert.
In college (graduated in 1988), typically four of us would go to Friendly’s for dinner on a weekend, and the waitress could easily give each of us a separate check, which avoided all the messiness about who had what.
Buxton’s!
I didn’t realize that they went up to Northern Jersey. I knew of a couple of them in Centrral New Jersey. They were a ride, but worth it. Buxton’s was an ice cream place that had lots of flavors, and their standout dish was the “Big Bux”, an enormous sundae that required the efforts of several people to finish. Supposedly, if you ate one by yourself they’d give you a free one.
They’re gone now. The one on Nassau Ave, opposite Princeton University disappeared long ago. The one we used to go to in West Windsor became a succession of Chinese restaurants (which I’ve eaten in many times).
At least Thomas Sweet’s is still there.
I loved Waldenbooks. In the early '80s I signed up for a lifetime discount card, 5-10% off any purchase of a SF or Fantasy book. I kept it so long cashiers would have no idea what kind of card it was, or how to apply the discount.
There’s a few of these still around in the northern and northwest suburbs of Chicago. One’s empty map link, one’s medical offices map link, and one’s a liquor store map link. As they were built before my time I don’t know which grocery chain(s) built them.
Watching Vertigo the other night, the scene where Scotty and Judy meet and she tells him she works at Magnin’s got me reminiscing about the Magnin’s that I grew up with, which led me to think about the other dept. stores: Bullock’s,The Broadway, Robinson’s and Buffums to name a few.
This whole thread is making me weepy 
Probaby Kohl’s; they expanded into Illinois and Indiana at their height in the 1970s, and this site, which shows old Kohl’s buildings, and what they look like now, shows one in Morton Grove.
I loved Waldenbooks so much I worked at one during high school and even college. Spent most of my paycheck on buying books at the employee discount rate. That was 1974-1978 or so. My first real paycheck job.
Waldenbooks was the first mass-market bookstore that opened in malls near where I lived. Before that, I had to buy books at the local newsstand, or department stores, or hardware stores (true!), or college bookstores, or travel far away to a Real bookstore. The selection at most of these was pretty small (although one Bambergers had a huge book section). When I saw the first Waldenbooks I was blown away. So many books, so much selection, most of it pretty inexpensive. It was still kinda far away, but within a couple of years one opened in the new mall that was within biking distance, and I was in heaven. Many years later, a Borders bookstore moved in even closer, with a phenomenal selection.
Then came the great internet shopping mall apocalypse, and the Waldenbooks, the B. Dalton’s, and even the Borders all disappeared. There are still the Barnes and Nobles near where I now live, and where I grew up, but it’s almost the only option. There are a very few independent bookstores left, even here in Boston, “the Athens of America,” where there used to be a bookstore every other block…
When did it disappear? When I lived in Princeton, 1980 - 1982, I don’t remember it, but we did have Thomas Sweet’s on Nassau Street. First place my daughter recognized. When we pushed her past it in her stroller when she was about 1 she point to it and said “yumm.”
The one in Palmer Square showed up quite anachronistically in “IQ” the movie about Einstein’s last days with Walter Matthau.