Very little food came in any kind of plastic container at all. The bag that actually holds the cereal used to be a satisfyingly thick, crinkly wax paper that would sort of stay closed now it’s a thin plastic film that never will. The box itself is infinitely thinner for both environmental and economic reasons. Even something as simple as a box of cereal isn’t the same as it was four decades ago. Meat was nearly always cut to order, and wrapped in brown butcher paper, tied with string, rather than laid out on a foam tray and stacked in coolers. Burlap has practically disappeared from anything but craft stores, but 40 years ago, potatoes, onions and oranges all came in burlap sacks. Everyone probably realizes that plastic grocery bags didn’t even used to exist, and that soda and milk came exclusively in glass bottles, and was all bottled nearby. Almost everything else has, too, but in ways that are almost invisible. The stores themselves aren’t the only thing about groceries that have changed. Competition and demographics, and the willingness of Americans to drive absolutely everywhere rather than walk anywhere, contributed to bigger and bigger centrally-located, chain-owned stores, and the death of these tiny independents.Īnd the experience of shopping in them changed, too Even the so-called supermarkets were very much part of their neighborhoods in those days, often repurposing previous buildings - such as the Central Markets location on Madison and Swan, which was built on the rather generous stone foundation of the Madison Avenue Second Reformed Church that had burned in 1930.īut with the move of population to the suburbs, the chains started to grow. The rest of the city’s shopping was done at small neighborhood stores with names like Gimondo, Femia, Sharkey Demaco, Rosenberg, and Tanski.
Trading Post was the biggest chain in the city, with 5 locations. There was one A&P in Albany, one Albany Public Market, one Grand Union, four Empires, two Central Markets (later to become Price Chopper). But even as late as 1958, the chains barely had a hold. For a while, there was a chain associated with the area’s seminal radio station, WGY Food Stores.
There were A&P stores, and Grand Unions and Mohicans. Somewhere around the 1930s the supermarket concept was developed – a neighborhood store, but with more, and run by a central chain. My first real job was working in one of them, one of the last of the high-quality butcher shops in the region, which was also a neighborhood grocery store.
#PRICE CHOPPER MADISON AVE WINDOWS#
The vast majority of these were small storefronts, usually the lower levels of residential buildings – you can often see reminders of them today, in places that long survived as neighborhood stores, as odd bump-outs on the fronts of brownstones, as enlarged entries and windows at the basement level.Įven when I was growing up in an older suburb in the ’60s and ’70s, they were still numerous. In 1920, when Albany had 113,000 residents, there were 20 wholesalers and an even greater number of retailers, in every corner of the city.Įvery neighborhood had several groceries in those days, and shopping for food was often a daily enterprise. Retail grocers counted in the hundreds, at a time when Albany’s population was just about 70,000. The 1870 directory for Albany alone listed 17 wholesale grocers. Grocery stores in the Capital District used to be numerous, to say the least. And yet everything about them has changed. Sure, 50 years ago, they were selling milk and meats, frozen foods and Cap’n Crunch, just as they are today. When things change all at once, it seems a revolution, but when they change little by little, it just seems the passing of time.
The world of today looks mostly like the world of yesterday to us, and yet there have been a thousand little changes over the years that separate those worlds. The trick of time is that it passes slowly, and changes are incremental, so you can hardly notice it happening.
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