The Independent Edition

Cousins Fresh Market Owner: Rushdi Mohammad Opened:  2013 Cooperative:  none Location:  5429 W Girard Ave, Carroll Park, Philadelphia, PA Photographed:  December 2021 Our second Philadelphia tour, about half a mile south of yesterday's ShopRite , bears a lot of similarities to the American Family Market we saw in Narberth. It was also built in the early 1950s (or so) as an A&P, although this one was retrofitted with a very simple Centennial facade in the early 1960s. I doubt this store made it to the SuperFresh (post-1983) era, when all Philadelphia-area A&P stores were converted to SuperFresh, and at some point it became an American Family Market also. The Girard American Family Market eventually gave way to the KS Thriftway , and it's unclear whether that store was actually affiliated with the Thriftway cooperative given that they didn't use the logo on the sign. That store closed around 2012, being converted to a Cousins Fresh Market in 2013. Cousins Fres...

American Family Market Owner: Paul Bovo Opened:  1964 Cooperative:  none Location:  230 Haverford Ave, Narberth, PA Photographed:  December 2021 Welcome to the small, quaint downtown of Narberth, PA! Retail fans know of this town from its ACME , but we're downtown for the 3700 square foot American Family Market. Originally an A&P, the American Family Market was taken over by its current owners in 1964. And AFM appears to have once been a small chain or cooperative of grocery stores in the Philadelphia area, which has long since dissolved. But other locations were at 911 N Franklin St in Philadelphia, since demolished, and 5429 Girard Ave , another obvious former A&P. There was at least one more but I haven't been able to find where it was exactly (I just recall seeing it once). Narberth is the only remaining American Family Market, which celebrated its 50th anniversary back in 2014. While it has been ranked as the top grocer in the area in the past, noted i...

The Gladwyne Market Owner: Renee Riccio Opened:  2009 under current ownership, early 1900s previously Cooperative:  none Location:  359 Righters Mill Rd, Gladwyne, PA Photographed:  December 2021 We start our look at Pennsylvania with this unique store, in the small town of Gladwyne about nine miles northwest of Center City Philadelphia. As we might expect from the name on the front, The Gladwyne Market House (referred to now as simply the Gladwyne Market most places) is, well, a market in a house. In fact, the Gladwyne Market takes up about 1400 square feet of the ground floor of this house, in what seems to be a very historically-preserved location. This store has continuously operated as a grocery store for over 100 years, but in 2009, it was acquired by the owners of The Market of Lafayette Hill about three and a half miles north. Gladwyne is a community of 4000 with a median household income of around $160,000, so this store is naturally both very small and ver...

It's time to enter Pennsylvania! If you got a little bored with my coverage of the mid-Atlantic region (and, I'll admit, there were a fair number of pretty boring stores and bad drive-by pictures, especially in Norfolk), now is the time to tune back in. We are back, just west of New Jersey, in the Philadelphia area! We're going to begin our coverage in the eastern part of the Main Line, a stretch of Philadelphia suburbs along US-30, which is the Lincoln Highway. In that area, we'll make stops in Gladwyne, Bryn Mawr, Wynnewood, and Narberth before entering the Philadelphia city limits for a look at stores around Carroll Park, Cathedral Park, and University City. My coverage of Philadelphia is not quite as dense as northern New Jersey nor northeastern Pennsylvania, but it's pretty solid, and we certainly have quite a few interesting stops as we move through the area from south to north, roughly. We begin with a look at a very small independent grocer in Gladwyne here ...