About The Blog
About A&P
A&P itself was a pioneer of
the modern-day supermarket, and many trends for the
retail industry along the way. With its inception in
1859, A&P (originally called the Great Atlantic
& Pacific Tea Company) used a “high-quantity/low-price”
format to sell tea to the American public at a much
lower cost than competitors at the time. On paper, it
looks risky: a retailer buys excessive amounts of
product for its shop so it can receive a lower price
from the distributor, and therefore sell it for less to
the customer. However, there is one major flaw: what if
the product does not sell? This issue can easily be
solved by rigorous marketing, trading jabs with your
competitors, and making it accessible for everyone. A&P
was able to do all of these by 1930 with a peak of just
over 16,000 stores. Does the above sound familiar?
Retail giant Wal-Mart uses this same strategy today, and
is often labeled the “Sam Walton way,”
although A&P was the first to use this rule-breaking
strategy nearly a century before Walton even opened his
first 5&10 variety store in Arkansas. Some other
trends A&P set along the way were grocery
pickup/delivery, self-service grocery stores (in terms
of aisles and cases), and the emphasis of a “Fresh
Wing” in supermarkets in the late 1980s with the
Futurestore concept: where 1/3 or more of the store
would be dedicated to an exponentially larger produce
department, delicatessen, in-store bakery, and butcher.
While A&P pioneered this concept in the 80s, it
became wildly popular with competitors after the 90s
that led to the large supermarkets of today.
About the Author
Prior to starting A&P Preservation, I was still wildly
interested in retail design and history. I first started
chatting on other retail blogs like Acme Style all the way back in 2011,
which took a look at another old-but-still-surviving
supermarket chain, Philadelphia-based ACME Markets.
Still-alive A&P at the time was not too much of interest
to me, but I still admired the impact they had made on the
retail industry as a whole. However, I began researching
more about A&P in 2015 as the lights went out at 300 of
their locations by the winter, and nearly 30,000 employees
out of a job-- some of those being at my nearest A&P in
Clinton, New Jersey. I visited the store again after closing
during the shelving/fixture sale.
I then started A&P Preservation
two years later in November 2017, and since then become
well-versed on not only the A&P company and its stores,
but also retail strategies, design, and everything from the
ground up. Nowadays, in addition to preserving the A&P
company here at A&P Preservation, I also enjoy urban
exploration, dead malls, and taking thousands of photos for
Google Maps, which you can view here. I often share some photos from
those content areas on the blog as well, so keep an eye out
for it!