What franchises or chains did you Home Town have

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m assuming that you grew up in a relatively small town, and long enough ago that such things weren’t common. It’s no big deal if you grew up in New York City and had a MacDonald’s. But in my circa 17,000 person town in the 1960s we didn’t have one (that was for the town next door, which had a major highway going through it).

Ben Franklin’s – a 5 and 10 that’s still around, although as a hobby and craft store nowadays. The one in my home town closed in the 1980s.

Acme Supermarket – there was also one on the highway in the next town over, but this was a smaller one right on Main Street. They still have over 150 stores in the Northeast, but both of these are gone from where I grew up. For years I wondered why I couldn’t find Rocket-Powered Roller Skates or Earthquake Pills there.

Rexall Pharmacy – the company virtually disappeared in 1977, although the name continued to be licensed. Our pharmacy that was a Rexall is still around, although it’s passed through multiple owners, and is no longer Rexall.

Banks and S&Ls – Not big chains, but some local banks and Sacings and Loans had branches on Main St.

Convenience Store – one local-area convenience chain had a store on Main St., even while the Acme was still operating. Now the Acme is gone and the convenience store is operating on part of their premises.

There were a few franchised gas stations – Mobil, Chevron, Shell

That was it Things have changed

Now

Dunkin’ Donuts – right on Main St.! Still amazes me.

Bank of America – this and a couple of other banking giants had bought the property or acquired the bank that used to be in the big banking temples on Main St.

Wawa – this convenience store moved into a couple of locations in town (but not on Main st.)

The big drug store in town – which was privately owned, got bought, then moved out of downtown to the edge of town, then repeatedly bought by other chains. It’s now a Walgreen’s, and probably the largest franchise or chain in town

There are still franchised gas stations, but they’ve changed. Chevron’s gone, but we have a BP.

But that’s it. No MacDonald’s or similar fast food joint. We still have local Pizza parlors (no Domino’s or Papa John’s or Pizza Hut). No 7-11 or other convenience besides Wawa.

It’s not “small-town authenticity”, I think the big businesses figure the town is too small a market with inadequate access and parking, so they stick to the nearby towns with highways.

2

Ben Franklin
Woolworth’s
Safeway
Rexall Drug
JC Penny (60s)
A&W Drive-in (the only chain restaurant in Anchorage for many years until the late 60s)
Piggly Wiggly grocery

3

The only chain store my childhood hometown had in when I was a child in the 1980s was a Cumberland Farms convenience store. (It also had “House of Pizza” which only learned as a teen was locally owned and NOT a chain of places with the other numerous “House of Pizzas” in my state.)

Today the town has a Dunkin Donuts, A Rite Aid, A Dollar General, and a Hannaford’s as well as the same Cumberland Farms.

4

I grew up in the 80s in town of around 30K. We had plenty of chains even back then.

McDonald’s
Burger King
Whataburger
KFC
Church’s
Pizza Hut
Pizza Inn
Walmart
H-E-B
Eckerd
Sears
Blockbuster

5

I pretty much grew up in a town with a population of 200. There was an Enco station and that’s it.

Our tiny town was also home to someone pretty high up in Tombstone Pizza, regional distributor or something; theirs was the only house with an alarm.

6

Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1970s (the city’s population was around 90,000, and the area was probably no more than 150,000):

Grocery stores: we had Sentry, Red Owl, Super Valu, and Kohl’s (all of them regional chains), as well as Sure Way (a local chain). It was a big deal when Cub Foods, a regional “big box” grocery chain, came to Green Bay in the early '80s.

Department/discount stores: we had a Sears, a Montgomery Ward, a JCPenney, and a couple of Kmarts. We also had Shopko (a regional discount store), Prange’s (a regional department store), and Prange-Way (Prange’s discount store chain). Wal-Mart and Target didn’t arrive until the 1990s.

Drug stores: we had Snyder Drugs (a regional chain), and maybe a Rexall or two.

Fast food restaurants: we had McDonalds, Burger King, Arby’s, and Taco Bell, plus Hardees (which was more of a regional chain). We also had a couple of Pizza Huts, and a Shakey’s Pizza.

7

The Original McDonalds
The Original Taco Tia (the precursor to Taco Bell)

At one point we actually had a Maid-Rite. The only one I’ve ever seen outside the Midwest.

KFC
BK
Church’s
Pizza Hut
Domino’s

8

We had quite a few small/regional chains:

Cardinal Drug
Western Auto
Superfresh
Ames Department Store
Pargo’s
Country Cookin’
Golden Skillet
Caravan
Barnaby’s Pizza

9

There was an Acme supermarket in Philadelphia when I lived there for a few years. Does everyone call it Ac-a-me or is that just a Philly thing?

10

We had a Bohack supermarket, part of a long-defunct NYC-area chain. According to Wikipedia, “The Bohack location at 87th St and 2nd Ave was featured in The Odd Couple when Felix went in and did shopping for his and Oscar’s date night with the “Coo-coo” Pigeon sisters.”

Now that’s fame.

Surprisingly to me, two chains which had stores not far from where I lived when growing up, Chicken Delight and Carvel Ice Cream, still exist, though Chicken Delight especially has shrunk markedly. There is a single Carvel outlet in Kentucky, located in the middle of nowhere, but not far from Pig, Kentucky, Cave City and the Icy Sink Baptist Church.

11

Belle Fourche, SD, 1980s (~4500 population):

Ben Franklin
Ace Hardware
Pamida
Taco Johns
Pizza Hut
Piggly Wiggly
Tastee-Freez

Gas stations were all local chains/franchises. These days, only Taco Johns and Pizza Hut remains of my childhood memories; the old Tastee-Freez became a video rental store, and is now a Subway. Ben Franklin is long gone, as is the Ace. Don’t recall what occupies those locations now (and looking on Google Street View, the answer seems to be “not much”). Pamida has been replaced with “Shopko Home” or something, and the old Piggly Wiggly is now a Lynn’s Dakotamart (another regional chain).

12

I lived in Vermillion, S.D. when it had a Pamida. I figured those outlets were for towns too dinky to rate a K-Mart.

13

Well my actual home town had 0 chains and still does. But the town where I attended school had Winn-Dixie and an A&P from way back. And in the 1970s, they landed TG&Y, Revco, KFC, and Hardee’s.

14

Shopko (which was based in Green Bay) itself folded in 2019 (though they still operate a chain of optical shops).

15

I grew up in a smallish Southern town in the 1980s, although the area has experienced rapid growth due to its proximity to Charlotte, and has become a sort of bedroom community for people who work in the city. Population back in the 1980s was around 10,000. Now it’s more like 30,000 I think.

In terms of national and regional chains, we had:
Hardee’s
Kentucky Fried Chicken
Pizza Hut
Roses (Regional discount store chain that was similar to Kmart)
Belk (And it was an old fashioned Main Street department store until they relocated to a new shopping center in the early 1990s)
A Sears catalog showroom like they had in smaller towns
Food Lion
Harris-Teeter (In fact our town was where the original Teeter’s Food Mart was founded)
Revco Drugs

That’s all the stuff that was there for longer than I can remember, but like I said, the town was growing fast.
At some point a McDonald’s opened by the shopping center where Roses was.
Wal-Mart came to town circa 1989 (which really hurt Roses). The Wal-Mart shopping center had a Winn-Dixie and a Subway, which I assume opened around the same time.
Burger King also opened near the Wal-Mart circa 1989. I remember thinking it was a really big deal that we got a Burger King.
And a bunch more stuff has opened since then. By the time I graduated high school there was a big mass of chain restaurants, motels, gas stations, and shopping centers out by the interstate.

16

Greenville Ohio, 1969 we had:

  1. Our first McDonalds
  2. Our first K-Mart style Department Store, Jamesway
  3. Sears, but it had always been there.
  4. A no name five and dime.

Everything else was locally owned. The pharmacy, donut shops, diners, movie theaters and car lots. The gas stations (while part of national chains) were know by the name of the guy who owned them, like Ed’s Sohio station and they had garages attached to them for the most part.

17

I lived just outside a village of < 10K and the only chain we had downtown was M&T Bank. That M&T Bank is still there, 40 years later, and the only new chain downtown is a Subway. In the early 80s we did get an Arby’s pretty close to downtown, enough that I would count it as being in the village, and that was my first experience with a drive-thru, even before McDonald’s. We also got a Convenient Food Mart pretty close to downtown and was also my first experience with a Convenience store per se. I’m sure there were sodas etc. at gas stations but the selection was probably small and I don’t remember ever getting anything in one. There was a store called the “Dime and Dollar” which was like a mix between a convenience store and a general store but I don’t remember anything it had besides candy.

The McDonald’s was technically in the village limits but I count it as being just off the highway and not close to the village.

It was adjacent to an only slightly larger city but which was farther from the highway and so had no chain stores that I remember except close to the highway which had a Your Host diner. It had two local department stores, one of which was far away from my home but which transformed one floor for Christmas so we went there each Christmas. The other I don’t remember ever going to but I do remember picking through the trash and finding discarded perfume-scented accounting books which were fascinating to my little self. That one is now a Big Lots.

18

Shows how often I make it home…

19

My grandfather called it Ac-a-me but my mother didn’t. Both Philly born (grandfather 1898, mother 1928) and raised. Others I heard using that pronunciation were more of my grandfather’s generation.

In my home town (within an easy walk or short bike ride) we had:

Sears
Woolworth
Spillane’s (a 5 and 10 chain based out of Allentown)
Wall-to-Wall Sound (a record store chain)
Genuardi’s supermarket (eventually purchased by Safeway)
Radio Shack
A & P supermarket
Penn Fruit supermarket (not sure if that was a chain)

20

18,000 person town in suburban Boston, in the 1970s

  • McDonalds (now gone)
  • Burger King (now a McDonalds)
  • Two regional supermarket chains (Finast and Donelan’s)
  • CVS drug store
  • Walgreens drug store
  • Ace hardware store
  • Zayre (regional department store, long gone)
  • Ames (regional department store, long gone)
  • A variety of gas stations (Exxon, Mobil, Gulf, Phillips 66)