Nothing lasts forever: Just ask National Tea, Penn Fruit, Grand Union
by Elliot Zwiebach
Oct 07, 2015
Supermarkets, like all businesses, come and go. Some disappear suddenly, while others fade ever so slowly from sight.
A&P, which has been fading away for years, is about to give up the ghost after 156 years — a spectacular run, certainly, for a company that once actually did stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Then there’s Haggen, which will disappear rather suddenly from Southern California, Arizona and Nevada just months after opening — before most consumers ever learned how to pronounce the name.
While the plan is to re-trench from 164 units to 38 core stores in the Pacific Northwest, that run may be limited, given that company officials have indicated the investment group that owns Haggen may ultimately opt to seek a buyer for the core.
Looking back at issues of SN over the last 60-plus years makes it clear that companies that dominated the industry in one era do not always endure into another — acquired or absorbed by competitors or simply closed down, their names discarded and forgotten. Ah, but once they were giants!
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