There were 86 Red & White markets in San Antonio at their height in the late 1940s. These were not what we would now call supermarkets, and some were more like corner stores. Often, the store was on the ground floor of a two-story, with apartments above, sometimes occupied by the owner and family.
Red & White was not exactly a chain but more of a distribution and branding system to help individual grocers compete with growing national chains that were eating their lunch. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., better known as A&P, was the first national chain, which grew rapidly from the 1910s onward from its original importing mission into a new type of no-frills grocery store.
According to a history on the company's website, www.aptea.com, the trend started in 1912 with the first A&P Economy Store in Jersey City, N.J. The store didn't extend credit or make deliveries and was basic in décor. But it charged lower prices than local competitors. With the launch of the Economy store, the chain spread rapidly from about 350 stores in 1910 to 15,418 stores in 1929.
A&P had two things going for it — lower prices afforded by volume buying and well-known store brands. Red & White was founded around 1930 by Smith M. Flickinger, a Buffalo, N.Y., grocer who “realized that the small, independent grocers could work together to compete more effectively,” according to a history on www.fedgroup.com, the website of Federated Group, which currently owns the Red & White brand. Flickinger formed a buying co-operative for independent grocers “and attracted quality vendors to offer customers high-quality products at competitive prices.”
While there were other such entities in the San Antonio grocery business, such as NAB (Nationally Advertised Brands) and Hom-Ond (pronounced “home-owned”) stores, Red & White had the first full line of private-label goods in the industry. Stores could vary in size and the number of products they carried, but all included the Red & White brand in their names, as in Alamo Heights Grocery and Market Red & White, W. Pablo Garcia Red & White, Penn Dixon Food Market Red & White, Schubert's Red & White and George Waitz Red & White, ancestor of the later Waitz Model Market.
In return for something like franchise fees, independent grocery merchants could purchase and stock the private-label brands, receive some advertising support and attend conferences with speakers who were leaders in the trade. In the early 1950s, Red & White opened regional bakeries to produce bread and other baked goods for a fresher product to compete with local bakeries.
According to newspaper classified advertisements from the 1930s to 1960s, Red & White stores often were sold by their owners, who said they made a gross income averaging anywhere from $35 a day during the Depression to a few thousand a month in later years.
In the heyday of Red & White — which still has stores, mostly in North Carolina — there were neighborhood groceries every couple of blocks or so. With San Antonio's growth, suburban sprawl, car culture and the rise of grocery giant H-E-B in the city, fewer people patronized small neighborhood stores. The number of Red & White stores declined through the 1950s, and most were closed by the end of the 1960s.
PIG WAS BIG: The Piggly Wiggly chain had several stores in San Antonio, reports architect John Speegle, who has done historic planning studies on buildings that used to be part of the venerable grocery chain, the nation's first to offer full self-service. That's the business model we're used to now, as opposed to the earlier system of giving your order to a clerk who would take down the products from shelves behind a counter.
To customers in the 1920s and '30s, when Piggly Wiggly got a foothold here, says Speegle, “These were interesting stores because of their innovation: price tags and customers selecting their own food.”
In his research, Speegle has found several extant buildings that formerly housed a Piggly Wiggly store — 1902 San Pedro Ave., just one-half block south of Woodlawn Avenue, another on Nolan, in the Dignowity Hill area, on South Presa and the building that was the former home of the Yarn Barn at Olmos Drive and McCullough Avenue.
Most, if not all, of these buildings had a distinctive black-and-white ceramic wainscot that may or may not have survived.
Hoping to compile a definitive list of remaining ex-Piggly Wiggly stores, Speegle looks for this detail while driving around older neighborhoods. If you spot one or know of one that has lost its identifying characteristic, please contact this column with memories and photographs for a future Piggly Wiggly roundup.
Email Paula Allen at historycolumn@yahoo.com.
Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/ @sahistorycolumn
